IST Distinguished Lecture: Anne L'Huillier
Prof. Anne L'Huillier (University of Lund, Sweden), one of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023, will be the speaker of the next IST Distinguished Lecture, titled “The route to attosecond pulses”. This event is co-organized by the Institute of Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion and the Physics Department (Scientific Area of Plasma Physics, Lasers and Nuclear Fusion) of Instituto Superior Técnico. The talk is part of the Laserlab-Europe conference, hosted by IPFN/IST.
Abstract: When an intense laser interacts with a gas of atoms, high-order harmonics are generated. In the time domain, this radiation forms a train of extremely short light pulses, of the order of 100 attoseconds. Attosecond pulses allow the study of the dynamics of electrons in atoms and molecules, using pump-probe techniques. This presentation will highlight some of the key steps of the field of attosecond science.
Anne L’Huillier received the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”.
Her research, which is both experimental and theoretical, is centred around high-order harmonic generation in gases and its applications. In the time domain, these harmonics correspond to a series of extremely short light pulses, in the extreme ultraviolet spectral range and with duration of a few tens or hundreds of attoseconds. Her research deals with attosecond source development and optimization as well as with the use of this radiation for the study of ultrafast (electron) dynamics. Attosecond light sources can be designed for various goals, e.g. towards high intensity for nonlinear pump/probe experiments or towards high repetition rate, for applications in condensed matter physics. Another active area of research of Anne L’Huillier and her group is the study of the electron dynamics in atomic systems, following a photoionization event induced by absorption of an attosecond light pulse.
Anne L’Huillier is a French/Swedish physicist working on the interaction between short and intense laser fields with atoms. Born in Paris in 1958 she defended her thesis on multiple multiphoton ionization in 1986, at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris and Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA). She obtained a permanent researcher position at the CEA the same year. She was a postdoc at the Chalmers Institute of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1986 and at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1988. She was a visiting scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1993. In 1995 she became Associate Professor at Lund University, then was appointed Professor of Physics in 1997. In 2023 she received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
