Donna Strickland

Donna Strickland (born May 27, 1959, Guelph, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian physicist who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics for her invention of chirped pulse amplification (CPA), a method of making pulses of laser light of high power and short duration. She shared the prize with American physicist Arthur Ashkin and French physicist Gérard Mourou. She was the third woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics, after Marie Curie (1903) and Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963).

Strickland received a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1981. She went to the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, for graduate school, where Mourou was her doctoral supervisor. She received her doctorate from that institution in 1989.

By the mid-1980s the intensity that a short laser pulse could deliver hit a plateau because it was impossible to amplify such a pulse any further without damaging the laser system. Strickland and Mourou devised a method in which a short laser pulse was stretched so its peak power was reduced. (When the pulse is stretched, the frequency of the laser light undergoes a change called a chirp, hence the name of the technique.) This stretched pulse could then be safely amplified because of its low peak power. The pulse was then compressed back into a short pulse, thus increasing its intensity. The paper they published on CPA in 1985 was Strickland’s first. Since the invention of CPA, the intensity that can be delivered in a short laser pulse has increased to the petawatt range (1 petawatt = 10¹⁵ watts), and the time of a pulse has decreased to a femtosecond (10⁻¹⁵ second). Such short intense laser pulses are now used in industry for precise cutting and in medicine for LASIK surgery.

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Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa from 1988 to 1991. She then worked at the laser division of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, from 1991 to 1992. From 1992 to 1997 she was on the technical staff of the Advanced Technology Center for Photonics and Opto-electronic materials at Princeton University. She joined the physics department of the University of Waterloo in 1997, where she became an associate professor.