We were incredibly happy to have Nobel Prize laureate Anne L’Huillier share her remarkable journey and groundbreaking research with us yesterday during our Tech Hub Breakfast.
Anne L’Huillier, Nobel Prize laureate (Physics 2023), gave a talk about the research behind her prize: generating and measuring attosecond light pulses. An attosecond (10⁻¹⁸ seconds) is the timescale at which electrons move inside atoms and molecules. Her work began in the late 1980s when her lab accidentally discovered that firing intense laser pulses at noble gases produced high-order harmonics, light at much higher frequencies than the laser itself, in the extreme ultraviolet range. She and her collaborators showed that these harmonics, when phase-locked, interfere constructively to produce trains of incredibly short light pulses.
After years of work, colleagues Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz measured these pulses in 2001, opening the field of “attosecond science.” Applications today include studying electron dynamics in atoms, semiconductor metrology (relevant to chip manufacturing), and a spinoff company she co-founded in Portugal.
Her advice to young researchers: choose what you genuinely love, because passion is necessary for sustained research; and be persistent, since breakthroughs often take years or decades, her own field spent nearly ten years unable to measure the pulses they believed existed.
Thank you, Anne, for so generously sharing your time, your science, and your story with our community. And thank you to everyone who joined us to listen!
