The Nobel Prize-winning research by Donna Strickland, a former staff scientist in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL’s) Laser Programs Directorate, was instrumental in the Laboratory’s development of a series of groundbreaking short-pulse, high-energy laser systems over the past two decades.
Self-described “laser jock” Strickland, who worked at LLNL in 1992, is only the third woman in history to win a Nobel Prize in physics, joining Marie Curie (1903) and Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1963). Strickland and her mentor, French physicist Gérard Mourou, were named Nobel Prize laureates on Oct. 2 for their work in developing chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) to amplify ultrashort laser pulses up to the petawatt (quadrillion-watt) level.
CPA is the underlying and enabling technology for all ultra-high-peak-power laser systems, such as LLNL’s Advanced Radiographic Capability (ARC) and High-repetition-rate Advanced Petawatt Laser (HAPLS), as well as in laser eye surgery and ultrafast cameras used for imaging molecular processes. As noted by the Nobel Committee for Physics, the Laboratory’s NOVA Petawatt, the world’s first petawatt laser, was a famous early example of a CPA laser.
Strickland and Mourou share the 2018 prize with Arthur Ashkin of the United States, inventor of “optical tweezers,” a process that uses light from a highly focused laser beam to manipulate viruses, bacteria and other microscopic objects.
Strickland, now a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, received her Ph.D. in optical physics from the University of Rochester, home to LLNL’s frequent collaborator, the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). Her work with Mourou, a former optics professor and scientist at LLE, was the basis for her Ph.D. dissertation.
After postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Strickland joined LLNL’s inertial confinement fusion program under Mike Perry, now a vice president at General Atomics in San Diego. She divided her time between work on high harmonic generation in noble gases and helping Todd Ditmire, then a graduate student and now director of the Center for High Energy Density Science at the University of Texas at Austin, build a CPA laser from a new, promising laser material called Cr-doped LiSAF. She contributed to papers on the design and performance of the Cr-doped LiSAF regenerative amplifier, extreme ultraviolet radiation (XUV) in laser-driven plasmas and a compact high-power femtosecond (quadrillionths of a second) laser.
“I have for 25 years told everyone that Donna taught me to align my first laser, and, in fact, she mentored me greatly during my first year in grad school,” Ditmire said. “I always joked that she had a god-like talent to be able to lay her hands on a laser cavity and get it to lase. I learned an incredible amount from Donna, which launched me on my own career in high-intensity, short-pulse lasers, first at LLNL and then as a professor here at the University of Texas.”
LLNL physicist John Crane, who worked with Strickland on the XUV paper, said she was already well known in her field because of her graduate work inventing CPA to build terawatt-scale lasers. “Several of Mike Perry’s graduate students and postdocs were female,” Crane said, “and she served as a great mentor, as she was young and already very accomplished, upbeat and fun to be around.”
One of those female graduate students was Kim Budil, now vice president for national laboratories at the University of California Office of the President. “I was over the moon when I saw that she was being honored for the truly transformative work she did with Gérard,” Budil said. “I met Donna when I was a graduate student working in the short-pulse laser lab at LLNL. She was very smart and already extremely accomplished, and that alone made her a great role model.
“However, what I remember most was how good a colleague and friend she was. I was struggling in my Ph.D. research and having a hard time believing I could be an independent researcher. She reminded me to stop apologizing for being there — I belonged and was contributing in a real way. She showed me how to be a real scientist, confident in her knowledge and ability to contribute and ready to be a member of the team. She was fun — and funny — and loved the work.”
In her comments after the prize was announced, Strickland reflected on Goeppert-Mayer’s career and said her award shows how far the scientific field has come since 1963 in terms of gender parity, even though women still make up only a quarter of attendees at major conferences. “It’s true that a woman hasn’t been given the Nobel Prize since then,” she said, “but I think things are better for women than they have been. We should never lose the fact that we are moving forward. We are always marching forward.”
Strickland, born in 1959 in Guelph, Canada, and Mourou, born in 1944 in Albertville, France, published the revolutionary article that would become the basis of Strickland's dissertation in 1985.