Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of
Waterloo
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 in New
York state. Together they paved the way toward the most intense laser pulses
ever created. The research has several applications today in industry and
medicine -- including the cutting of a patient's cornea in laser eye surgery,
and the machining of small glass parts for use in cell phones.
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. She is a recipient of a Sloan
Research Fellowship, a Premier's Research Excellence Award and a Cottrell
Scholar Award. She served as the president of the Optical Society (OSA)
in 2013 and is a fellow of OSA and SPIE (International Society for Optics
and Photonics). Strickland is an honorary fellow of the Canadian Academy of
Engineering and holds numerous honorary doctorates.
Strickland earned a PhD in optics from the University of Rochester and a
B.Eng. from McMaster University.
Thursday, November 7th 2019, 18:30
Stephen Leacock Building, Leacock Auditorium (room 132)
Generating High-Intensity, Ultrashort Optical Pulses
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.
Friday, November 8th 2019, 15:30
McIntyre Medical Building, room 522
From Nonlinear Optics to High-Intensity Laser Physics
The laser increased the intensity of light that can be generated by
orders of magnitude and thus brought about nonlinear optical interactions
with matter. Chirped pulse amplification, also known as CPA, changed the
intensity level by a few more orders of magnitude and helped usher in a
new type of laser-matter interaction that is referred to as high-intensity
laser physics. In this talk, I will discuss the differences between nonlinear
optics and high-intensity laser physics. The development of CPA and why short,
intense laser pulses can cut transparent material will also be included. I
will also discuss future applications.
|