11 May 2026
Detecting cancer, diabetes, and cardiac and respiratory diseases before symptoms appear: that is the goal of Ferenc Krausz, who is combining his Nobel Prize-winning laser technology with medicine and AI.
Light sets the rhythm for Ferenc Krausz, and it is no leisurely waltz. The flashes of light with which the physicist experiments in his Munich laboratories last no longer than a hundred billionths of a billionth of a second – or, in technical terms, less than 100 attoseconds.
It is one of those physical units that are hard to grasp intuitively – and analogies are little help. One goes like this: A single second contains as many attoseconds as there have been seconds since the Big Bang. Or bluntly: the flashes are damned short.Continue