Early life and education
Ferenc Krausz is remembered in physics for work that changed what the next generation was able to take for granted.
Ferenc Krausz was born at Mór in 1962. His recorded nationality is Austria. He was educated at Budapest University of Technology and Economics and Eötvös Loránd University.
Career and research
Modern research is collective and heavily instrumented; individual credit is harder to assign, and the significant results usually carry many names.
He held appointments at Centre for Advanced Laser Applications, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, where the work centred on attophysics.
Interdisciplinary work and research environment
Physics rewards the awkward question, and punishes the elegant answer that no instrument can confirm.
He did not stay inside one field: the work runs across physics and genetics, which tells you as much about the era's training as about the person.
Working from Austria shaped what was possible. Access to instruments, collections, journals and colleagues has always been geographic, and the history of science is partly a history of that inequality.
Honours and awards
The honours are a fair index of how the work was received - Nobel Prize in Physics (2023), Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2011) and Wolf Prize in Physics (2022).
Significance and current status
Read now, the significance is less in any single result than in the fact that the results held. Physics is cumulative, and a contribution counts if the next generation could stand on it.
Ferenc Krausz is still working, and the final assessment of his contribution has not been made - the ordinary condition of a living scientist.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics — 2023
- Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany — 2011
- Wolf Prize in Physics — 2022
- Held posts at Centre for Advanced Laser Applications, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics
- Educated at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Eötvös Loránd University and TU Wien
- Fields of research: attophysics
