Name: Charalambidis Dimitris
Nationality: Hellenic
Date of birth: 29 September 1952
Short CV:
1975: graduated in Physics, University of Athens, Greece
1978: Physikdiplom, Univ. of Freiburg, FRG
1979-1982: Teaching and military Service
1987: PhD in Physics, Univ. of Freiburg, FRG
Current positions:
Full Professor of Physics Univ. of Crete, Greece, Affiliated Faculty member at FORTH-IESL and Scientific Chief Advisor of Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI-ALPS) Szeged, Hungary.
After finishing my studies in Athens I decided to continue towards post-graduate studies in Germany. My Greek degree has not been accepted as equivalent to the German Diploma and thus I did additional studies at the Univ. of Freiburg, at that time FRG, that led to obtaining the German Diploma in Physics.
Returning to Greece I had to serve in the Navy for close to two years and for some period I was teaching Physics, Math and Chemistry to schoolchildren.
In 1983 I returned to Germany and started my PhD in the Albert Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg i.Br. My PhD was on Beam Foil Spectroscopy performed at the 7MV Van der Graaf accelerator of the University. During my PhD I measured lifetimes, fluorescence yields and decay rates of metastable states of Li, Be and B like ions of C,N,O and Ne, as well as Zeeman quantum beats applying x-ray and electron spectroscopy, using already at that time position sensitive detectors. It was during this period that I got fascinated working in the lab, setting up demanding experiments, solving problems, being creative, focused and dedicated, taking important initiatives and finally being successful.
After the completion of the PhD I was recruited at FORTH IESL as a post-doctoral fellow, where half a year later I got a researcher position. During this period, at FORTH-IESL, a highly dynamic and rapidly developing laser laboratory was established and operating, attracting significant funds from competitive EU projects. In this optimal environment of large research opportunities, I switched my research activities from accelerator atomic physics to laser based atomic and molecular physics, coherent phenomena, multiphoton processes, non-linear optics and later to strong field interactions in atoms and molecules and ultrafast dynamics. Meanwhile I was elected Assistant Professor, then Associate and in 2003 Full Professor in the Physics Department of the University of Crete, while remaining till today affiliated faculty member at FORTH-IESL, where I always had me research laboratories.
In Crete, I have learned to appreciate and serve quality in research, to choose and work in timely forefront areas, to establish and lead a successful research team, to be competitive internationally, to present and promote our research in international events, to organize such events, to participate and contribute to international research evaluation and management panels and to participate in a number of EU funded projects with a total IESL budget ~9 MEuro. In the framework of these European projects a number of active fruitful collaborations have been developed. MPQ, Univ. of Burgundy, LENS, LOA, AMOLF, Univ. Aut. de Madrid, Univ. of Dublin, Imperial College, Politecnico di Milano, KFKI in Europe, LLNL and Oak Ridge in the US are institutions, with which common experiments and projects have been pursued or are ongoing. Most important in the same framework a large number of young researches from abroad and Greece have been trained over the years in our laboratory, quite a few of which are now faculty members at different places worldwide. Highlights of my research in Crete include the demonstration of Laser Induced Continuum Structure in different systems and coupling schemes, development of quantitative methods in Multi-Photon Ionization processes and Coherent Control. Since the advent of experimental attosecond science I have contributed to the field focusing in the generation of energetic attosecond pulses and their exploitation in non-linear processes in the XUV spectral regime. The first direct observation of attosecond bunching; the generation of energetic coherent XUV super–continua for the synthesis of intense isolated attosecond pulses; the implementation of the first XUV-pump-XUV-probe experiments at the boundary between femto- and attosecond scales are examples of the work produced by our attosecond S&T laboratory in the last decate.
Since 2008 I actively participate in the preparation and implementation of the European Research Infrastructure “Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI)”. Already during the formation of the concept of the ELI project I have co-introduced the idea of the inclusion of attosecond research as a main component of the project. Later on I have contributed at different capacities to the implementation of the ELI-Attosecond Light Pulse Source (ELI-ALPS) project, in which currently I serve as chief scientific advisor.
Thanks to the MEDEA network I recently started activites in producing or acting in video clips, toolkits and other PR activities.
More detailed, occasionally updated, information about me can be found in