Dr. Donna Strickland
Professor, Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Waterloo
Nobel Laureate, Physics 2018

Nobel Lecture (Public Lecture) Generating High-Intensity, Ultrashort Optical Pulses
Abstract:
With the invention of lasers, the intensity of a light wave was increased by orders of magnitude over what had been achieved with a light bulb or sunlight. This much higher intensity led to new phenomena being observed, such as violet light coming out when red light went into the material. After Gérard Mourou and I developed chirped pulse amplification, also known as CPA, the intensity again increased by more than a factor of 1,000 and it once again made new types of interactions possible between light and matter. We developed a laser that could deliver short pulses of light that knocked the electrons off their atoms. This new understanding of laser-matter interactions, led to the development of new machining techniques that are used in laser eye surgery or micromachining of glass used in cell phones.

Donna Strickland is a Canadian physicist who, together with Gérard Mourou and Arthur Ashkin, was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for "groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics". After Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, she is the third woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The public lecture will be held in English at 7 p.m. at the TU Dresden Lecture Hall Center. Admission is free, registration is requested at: https://tud.de/mn/nobel