Anne L'Huillier, one of the three winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics, and her colleagues set a world record for creating the smallest laser pulse.
Anne L'Huillier's colleagues and students congratulate her on winning the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics. Video: Nina Ransmyr/Lund University
On the morning of October 3 (Swedish time), the Nobel Committee had difficulty contacting Anne L'Huillier to inform her that she had won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics. They finally did so after several missed calls because she was teaching.
The news brought a big change to the class, and her students were excited. L'Huillier "tried to continue the lecture," she said in a phone conversation with Adam Smith, the scientific director at Nobel Media. But the last half hour of the class became "a little difficult."
Anne L'Huillier (65 years old) is a professor at Lund University, Sweden. She and two scientists Pierre Agostini (55 years old) and Ferenc Krausz (61 years old) were honored for their experimental methods to create attosecond light pulses (a unit of time 1 attosecond equals 1×10⁻¹⁸ seconds - an extremely small period of time) to study electron dynamics in matter.
L'Huillier is the fifth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in the more than 120-year history of the prestigious award. The previous four women include Polish scientist Marie Curie (in 1903), German-American physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer (in 1963), Canadian PhD Donna Strickland (in 2018) and American astronomer Andrea Ghez (in 2020).
Anne L'Huillier is the fifth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Photo: Kennet Ruona/Lund University
L'Huillier was born in Paris, France, in 1958. She defended her thesis on multiphoton ionization in 1986 at the Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris. That same year, she was appointed permanent researcher at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). In 1995, she became an associate professor at Lund University, then a professor of physics in 1997. She has been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2004.
L'Huillier's research, both experimental and theoretical, focuses on the generation of high-order sinusoidal waves in gases and their applications. In the time domain, these waves correspond to a series of ultrashort light pulses, in the ultraviolet spectrum, with a duration of a few tens or hundreds of attoseconds. Her research involves the development and optimization of attosecond sources as well as the use of this radiation to study ultrafast electron dynamics. In addition, L'Huillier is also actively studying electron dynamics in atomic systems, following a photoionization event caused by the absorption of attosecond light pulses.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, physicists used their knowledge of resonance frequencies to create attosecond pulses in the lab. Agostini and his colleagues developed a technique called Rabbit, and in 2001 they successfully created a series of laser pulses that lasted 250 attoseconds. That same year, Krausz's group used a slightly different method to create and study single pulses that lasted 650 attoseconds. In 2003, L'Huillier and his colleagues beat them both with a laser pulse that lasted just 170 attoseconds, setting a record for the world's smallest laser pulse.
Interestingly, L'Huillier was a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics from 2007 to 2015. This made her Nobel Prize win even more special. "I know what it's like to win a Nobel Prize, it's incredibly difficult, and I also know the work that the committee does behind the scenes. So I'm very, very grateful," she told Smith over the phone.
L'Huillier also said that she is still constantly discovering new things in her field of research. "Even now, 30 years later, we are still learning new things. We are trying to improve the process for some applications. It is a complex field of physics, but that is what makes it so interesting," she shared.
Thu Thao ( Synthesis )
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