On the occasion of the meeting of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Prof. Donna Strickland payed a visit to the attoworld laboratories at MPQ and LMU.
Strickland works on nonlinear optics, the interaction of intense laser light with matter and ultrashort laser pulses. In 1985, she and Gérard Mourou developed Chirped Pulse Amplification, which allows the generation of ultra-short laser pulses of very high intensity. Their invention created new fields of research, including particle acceleration with lasers and attosecond science. Prof. Strickland is the third woman who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (2018).
Together with Prof. Roland Sauerbrey (Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf) and Andreas Barth (Stockholm University), Prof. Strickland familiarized herself with current research topics at attoworld. They were excited to learn about the new concepts of attosecond metrology 2.0, latest advances in cancer detection by electric-field molecular fingerprinting and petawatt-laser-driven proton acceleration.