Mohammed Hassan is an associate professor of physics and optical sciences at The University of Arizona (UA). He has 13 years of experience in the attosecond physics and ultrafast electron microscopy and imaging research fields. He earned his PhD from the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics. He joined Prof. Ahmed H. Zewail’s group at Caltech as a postdoctoral scholar through 2017.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Hassan developed the light field synthesizer to generate the first optical attosecond pulse, the shortest light pulse documented in the Guinness World Records. Exploiting this tool, he measured the time an electron takes to respond and move. His breakthroughs have been published in high-profile journals.
He is currently well-known in his field of attosecond physics for developing attosecond electron microscopy (attomicroscopy), a camera that will film the electron motion in action. He used this tool to image the electron motion in the solid state. This electron imaging opens a new era in ultrafast electron imaging and will lead to many breakthroughs and high-impact scientific achievements. Attomicroscopy imaging opens a new window to the quantum world. Recently, he has granted a patent for his attomicroscopy camera.
Furthermore, he established a new methodology to sample the light field of ultrafast laser pulses and a new methodology to measure the electronic delay response in the neutral matter. Also, he demonstrated the attosecond optical switch and the capability to encode data on ultrafast laser pulses, which paves the way to establish attosecond and femtosecond optoelectronics working at petahertz speeds.
Hassan received the international Max-Planck fellowship in 2009. He received the Air Force Young Investigator Award (YIP) in 2019. Hassan also received many prestigious awards for his attomicroscopy project from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation 2018, the WM Keck Foundation 2019, and recently the inaugural AFOSR Director’s Research Initiative (DRI) Award 2022. Moreover, he was awarded 2022 Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions (HBCUs/MSIs) for his institute.
