Applied Physics/Physics Colloquium: Anne l'Huillier- "The World of Atoms at the Attosecond Time Scale"

Extreme Ultraviolet light sources based on high-order harmonic generation in gases consist of extremely short light bursts, in the 100-attosecond range, allowing for outstanding temporal resolution. Attosecond pulses enable the study of atoms in an entirely new way. It is now possible to measure tiny time delays in photoionization and the phase change of an electron across a resonance. Recently, the quantum state of a photoelectron has been determined by a tomography technique.

Anne L'Huillier is a Swedish/French researcher in attosecond science.In 1995, she moved to Lund University, Sweden, and became a full professor in 1997. Her research, which includes both theory and experiment, deals with the interaction between atoms and intense laser light, and in particular the generation of high-order harmonics of the laser light, which, in the time domain, consists of trains of attosecond pulses. She has gotten several awards for her research, e.g. the 2011 L’Oréal-Unesco award for women in science and the 2021 Max Born prize from Optica. In 2022, she shared the Wolf Prize in Physics and the BBVA Award for Basic Sciences with P. Corkum and F. Krausz. In 2023, she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with P. Agostini and F. Krausz. She is a member of the Swedish, American, Austrian, French, and Italian Academies of Sciences.