About the Talk:
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 Prof. Gerard Mourou and Prof. Donna Strickland 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. They 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.
About the Speaker:
Prof. Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She joined the ranks of Marie curie in 2018, becoming the third woman in history to win Nobel Prize in Physics. She, who helped revolutionize laser physics, shares half the Nobel Prize with French laser physicist Prof. Gerard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time when they published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 at the University of Rochester, USA. Together they paved the way toward the shortest and most intense laser pulses created by humankind. The team's research has a number of applications today in industry and medicine - everything from laser eye surgery to laser printers.
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