Nobel Laureate Lecture - Dr. Donna Strickland
Monday, April 4, 2022
9:30am general lecture, 3:00pm technical lecture in the USU Ballrooms
Every year the CNSM Student Council invites a Nobel Laureate to Cal State Long Beach.
Our Nobel Laureate Speaker for 2022 is Dr. Donna Strickland, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 "for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses." All are welcome to attend.
Please note that Dr. Strickland will be presenting remotely. The presentation can be viewed via a live broadcast in the USU Ballroom, or by joining the Zoom webinars.
Registration
There are 2 separate lectures. For Cal State Long Beach students, faculty, and staff, no registration is needed to attend the live broadcast in the USU Ballroom.
A short registration is needed for each lecture if you are attending via Zoom.
Abstract:
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 Gérard Mourou and I 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. We 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.
Abstract:
The laser increased the intensity of light that can be generated by orders of magnitude and thus brought about nonlinear optical interactions with matter. Chirped pulse amplification, also known as CPA, changed the intensity level by a few more orders of magnitude and helped usher in a new type of laser-matter interaction that is referred to as high-intensity laser physics. In this talk, I will discuss the differences between nonlinear optics and high-intensity laser physics. The development of CPA and why short, intense laser pulses can cut transparent material will also be included. I will also discuss future applications.
About Dr. Strickland
Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 for developing chirped pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester.
Strickland earned a B.Eng. from McMaster University and a PhD in optics from the University of Rochester. Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of technical staff at Princeton University. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations. She was named a 2021 Hagler Fellow of Texas A&M University and sits on the Growth Technology Advisory Board of Applied Materials.
Strickland served as the president of the Optica (formerly OSA) in 2013 and is a fellow of Optica, SPIE, the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society. She is an honorary fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Physics, an international member of the US National Academy of Science and member of the Pontifical Academy of Science. Strickland was named a Companion of the Order of Canada.
Past Nobel Laureate Lecturers
A Nobel Laureate has been invited to speak to the Cal State Long Beach campus nearly every year since 1976. A list of these guest speakers can be found on CNSM Nobel Laureate Lecturers archive.
