Anne Weber is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Physics, King's College London. Anne Weber completed her PhD at King’s in May 2026 under the supervision of Emilio Pisanty, titled “Caustics and catastrophes in strong-field physics — Picard–Lefschetz theory as a universal approach to saddle-point methods in attosecond science”. She currently continues her work as a Post-doctoral Researcher. Before she joined King’s, she had graduated with a Master’s in physics from the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, Germany.

Research

Anne's research focuses on the theoretical description of strong-field light-matter interactions, such as tunnel ionisation and high-harmonic generation. In particular, she studies the link between the intuitive semi-classical description of the processes and the fully quantum-mechanical integral description.

In her PhD she showed that this link is provided by Picard–Lefschetz theory which allows to express a path integral as a sum of distinct contributions stemming from Lefschetz thimbles around saddle points. With that, she realised the computational methods to identify the relevant semi-classical contributions, which – in the context of attosecond science – work for arbitrary driving laser waveforms, and across parameter regions where the saddle points coalesce and produce caustics.

Anne enjoys collaborating with both theorists and experimentalists to further test and expand the application of these new computational approaches.

Research Interest

• Strong-field physics
• Attosecond science
• Saddle-point methods
• Picard-Lefschetz theory
• Catastrophe theory
• Semi-classical methods

Thesis

Caustics and catastrophes in strong-field physics: Picard–Lefschetz theory as a universal approach to saddle-point methods in attosecond science