Johannes Feist

I am an Associate Professor (Profesor Titular) at the Department of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics and the Condensed Matter Physics Center (IFIMAC) at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

I obtained my PhD in 2009 as a student of J. Burgdörfer at Vienna University of Technology within the International Max Planck Research School on Advanced Photon Science. In my thesis, I studied correlated electron dynamics in the helium atom within the context of the emerging field of attosecond science. This relied on large-scale calculations on high-performance computers, enabling the first fully converged calculations of non-sequential two-photon double ionization of helium in intense extreme-ultraviolet pulses. I also contributed significantly to the theory of attosecond streaking, which allows to measure the time delay accumulated by an electron leaving the atom after photoionization.

After finishing my PhD, I won the post-doctoral fellowship of the Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (ITAMP) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Harvard Physics Department (2009-2012), where I continued several collaborations within the field of attosecond physics, and also started working on quantum nanophotonics and plasmonics. Within a collaboration with M. Lukin, I made significant theoretical contributions to guide the experimental implementation of a setup coupling a single laser-trapped atom to a nanophotonic cavity.

I then joined the group of F. J. García Vidal at the Department of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics and the Condensed Matter Physics Center (IFIMAC) at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid as a senior postdoc. During this time, I started to lead a research line on strong light-matter coupling with organic molecules, for which I won a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant in 2014. Based on that research, I obtained an ERC Starting Grant on “Modification of molecular structure under strong coupling to confined light modes”, providing 1.5 million € that allowed me to establish my own group and follow an ambitious program forming the basis of much of my current research. One major focus has been the emerging field of polaritonic chemistry and molecular polaritonics, to which I have made several seminal contributions. In order to bring together the community working on these topics, we initiated the workshop series Molecular Polaritonics, with editions in 2019, 2022, and 2025.

Contact

Johannes Feist
Departamento de Física Teórica de la Materia Condensada
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Facultad de Ciencias, Módulo 5, 506
Tel.: +34 91497 2662
Email: johannes.feist@uam.es