Ludger Wöste (born 2 May 1946 in Emsbüren) is a German physicist and professor at the Free University of Berlin.
[1][2] Wöste studied physics and electrical engineering at the RWTH Aachen University from 1965 and physics at the University of Bonn from 1968 with a diploma from Herbert Walther in 1972 (deflection of a sodium atom beam in the radiation field of a dye laser) and from 1973 to 1978 as an assistant to Ernst Schumacher at the University of Bern, where he received his doctorate in 1978 (mass selective laser spectroscopy on metal atom clusters).
As a postdoc he was with Richard N. Zare at Stanford University until 1980, where he worked on laser chemistry (reactions on optically oriented molecules) and then he was until 1987 project manager (photodynamic behavior of metal clusters) and lecturer at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, and from 1981 as head of research for laser applications.
In 1984, he was a visiting professor at the Aimé Cotton Laboratory of the University of Paris-Sud, where he studied the transition from non-conducting to conducting metal in mercury clusters.
In the 2000s, along with his former PhD student Jean-Pierre Wolf, Wöste and colleagues constructed the world's first mobile terawatt laser system, Teramobile.