Ushering In a New Era Using High Intensity Lasers
The Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering is honored to host Dr. Donna Strickland, Nobel Laureate in Physics (2018), as a speaker for the seventh Abdus Salam Annual Memorial Lecture.
Energizing light beyond the luminance of a candle not only cleared the way for explorers on land, sea and air, but also for the explorers inside the laboratory. It begat an era of optics, slewing passion laden explorers towards studying spectacular phenomena like spectroscopy.
Fast forward to the 1980s, a similar leap was in the making. Scaffolded by hard work and a drive to create a high intensity optical laser, Dr. Donna Strickland successfully invented the ‘chirped pulse amplification’ technique, ushering in a new era of research in optics that led to a new understanding of laser-matter interactions, development of new machining techniques that are now used in laser eye surgery and micromachining techniques used in the production of glass used in smartphones.
Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 for developing chirped pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester.
Brief biography of Professor Strickland:
Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 for developing chirped pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester.
Strickland earned a B.Eng. from McMaster University and a PhD in optics from the University of Rochester. Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of technical staff at Princeton University. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations. Strickland served as the president of the Optical Society (OSA) in 2013 and is a fellow of OSA, SPIE, the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society. She is an honorary fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Physics and an international member of the US National Academy of Science. Strickland was named a Companion of the Order of Canada.
The lecture will be open to the public and will be zoomed live on the School's social media channels:
