Birger Seifert

Professor Seifert’s areas of research as an experimental physicist are classical optics, quantum optics, and lasers. In the field of classical optics, he works on novel nonlinear crystals, for example, metal–organic frameworks but also on the spatio-temporal characterization of ultrashort pulses, femtosecond pulse shaping, spectral broadening using self-phase modulation, micro-structured optical fibers, and soliton molecules. In the field of quantum optics, he has long been working on the generation and detection of squeezed light, but he has also been working on optical parametric oscillators, spontaneous parametric down-conversion and heralded single photons in recent years. Most of his lasers were built in his research group, e.g. femtosecond titanium-sapphire lasers, external cavity diode lasers, and Nd:Cr:YAG solar lasers, or optimized, e.g. ytterbium-doped fiber lasers amplified with chirped-pulse amplification.