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Professor Faria is a specialist on theoretical strong-field laser-matter interaction. Since the mid-1990s, she has been developing theoretical models for several phenomena in this context, such as high-order harmonic generation, above-threshold ionization or laser-induced nonsequential doubleand multiple  ionization. Dr Faria has around 80 publications in this research area, in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and has participated in several conferences in Optical Physics, in many of which as an invited speaker. She is also a referee for several optics journals (such as Physical Review A and  Letters, Optics Communications, JOSA B, Journal of Modern Optics, Optics Letters, Nature Communications and Journal of Physics B), and has various collaborations with leading groups in the field. She also actively collaborates with scientists of other research areas, such as quantum optics and mathematical physics. Ongoing collaborations include Professor Andreas Fring (City University), the theory and experimental groups at the MBI-Berlin, Professor Maciej Lewenstein (Institute for Photonic Sciences, Barcelona), Professor Anna Sanpera (Universidad Autonoma, Barcelona), Dr Henning Schomerus (Lancaster University), Professor Jon Marangos (Imperial College), and Professor Ingrid Rotter (Max Planck Institut, Dresden).

Up to the 1980s, the phenomena occurring in the context of the interaction of atoms and radiation were theoretically well described by perturbation theory. Within the past decade, however, laser sources with peak intensities of the order of 10 ¹⁶ W/cm² have become experimentally feasible. In this intensity regime, the external laser field is comparable to the binding energies of the electrons, and therefore it can no longer be treated as a perturbation. The inadequacy of this theory has also been confirmed by several experimental observations concerning high-intensity optical phenomena, already for fields of the order of 10¹³W/cm². Therefore, matter in strong laser fields poses now a great challenge to both theoretical and experimental physicists, such that this field of research constitutes one of the most active areas within atomic physics.
Apart from the understanding of the main phenomena in this intensity regime, such as high-order harmonic generation and ionization, applications are for instance plasma physics (in particular fusion), particle physics, and x-ray sources. Furthermore, since the physical mechanisms behind strong-field phenomena take place within hundreds of attoseconds (10^-18s), they constitute powerful tools for resolving or even controlling dynamic processes with subfemtosecond precision. Concrete examples are dynamic imaging of, for instance, molecular systems, with attosecond precision, or  the generation of attosecond pulses. In fact, some of these applications are considered as one of the five grand challenges in fundamental science for the 21st century.