Anne L’Huillier

Anne L’Huillier (born August 16, 1958, Paris, France) is a French physicist who was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for her theoretical and experimental work with attosecond pulses of light. She shared the prize with French physicist Pierre Agostini and Hungarian-born Austrian physicist Ferenc Krausz. She was the fifth woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics. An attosecond is 10⁻¹⁸ second. When electrons move in atoms and molecules, they move on attosecond timescales. By generating pulses of light that last tens or hundreds of attoseconds, scientists can study the movements of electrons.

In 1980 L’Huillier earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the École Normale Supérieure in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a suburb of Paris. She then earned a graduate degree in theoretical physics and mathematics from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, also near Paris, and later began a permanent position at the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA). Though she initially studied both mathematics and physics, she focused on experimental physics for a doctorate at CEA and successfully defended her thesis in 1986.

In 1986 L’Huillier gained a postdoctoral position at the Chalmers Institute of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. In 1988 she became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. L’Huillier became a visiting scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, in 1993. She joined Lund University (Lund, Sweden) as an associate professor in 1995 and was appointed professor of physics there two years later.

L’Huillier’s prizewinning work began in the early 1980s with studies of noble gas atoms that had been ionized to lose many or all of their electrons. L’Huillier and collaborators then used an infrared laser on such atoms and observed the unusual result of high-harmonic generation (HHG). The intensity of the higher harmonics (frequencies that are integer multiples of the original frequency) of the original laser frequency did not decrease with higher frequencies but instead remained constant up to very high harmonics before decreasing. For example, when the laser goes through argon gas, the intensity remained relatively constant from the 5th to the 33rd harmonic.

In the early 1990s L’Huillier and collaborators were able to explain HHG using quantum mechanics. Once it was fully understood how HHG happened, the next step, which L’Huillier and her collaborators showed, was to add some of these high harmonics together to make pulses of very short duration lasting attoseconds, which was done in the early 2000s by groups led by L’Huillier’s co-Nobelists Agostini and Krausz.

Among her other honors are the L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Award (2011), the Carl Zeiss Research Award (2013), and the Blaise Pascal Medal from the European Academy of Sciences (2013).