Anne L’Huillier: The 2024 SPIE Maiman Laser Award
Anne L’Huillier, is a professor of atomic physics at Lund University and one of the principal pioneers in the fields of High Harmonic Generation (HHG) and attosecond science. L’Huillier received her PhD in experimental physics in 1986. In 1987, as a researcher at the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), she discovered that many different overtones of light arose when she transmitted infrared laser light through a noble gas: each overtone is a light wave with a given number of cycles for each cycle in the laser light, and they are caused by the laser light interacting with atoms in the gas, which gives some electrons extra energy that is then emitted as light. She has continued to explore this phenomenon through research both experimental and theoretical, laying the groundwork for subsequent breakthroughs. In 2023, alongside Pierre Agnostini and Ferenc Krausz, L'Huillier received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics: her Nobel-winning experiments with attosecond pulses of light were recognized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for having “given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules.”
L'Huillier is esteemed as a research scientist throughout the ultrafast laser and attosecond communities. Also a committed teacher, she first learned that she’d won the Nobel Prize during a lecture break, then continued teaching for another half-hour with the then-embargoed news in her head. In 2022, she was the recipient of the Wolf Prize in Physics “for pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics,” along with Ferenc Krausz and 2018 SPIE Gold Medal recipient Paul Corkum. In 2018, L'Huillier gave a plenary presentation at SPIE Photonics Europe, and in 2020, she was featured in the SPIE Women in Optics publication. “I was inspired by one of my grandfathers, who was a professor in electrical engineering and did research in radiocommunications,” she said at that time. “The landing on the moon was also something I remember very vividly as a child and that inspired me to work in science and engineering.”
“Anne L’Huillier's work in high-order harmonic generation and the plateau was groundbreaking, reshaping nonlinear optics and extending beyond perturbation theory limits,” notes SPIE Fellow and professor of physics at ETH Zurich Ursula Keller. “Her pioneering efforts, including key experiments on phase matching of harmonics, facilitated the generation of the first attosecond pulses, and it was my acquaintance with her during my 2001 Lund sabbatical that sparked my own attosecond science research. I am thrilled about her well-deserved SPIE Maiman award recognition.”
Meet the other 2024 SPIE Society Award recipients.
Read more about Anne L’Huillier and the SPIE Maiman Laser Award.
