You are cordially invited to a special guest lecture by the 2018 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Prof. Donna Strickland. The lecture is hosted under the auspices of the International Optics Society (IOS) and the 2024 International Optics Conference taking place in South Africa. The lecture is supported by Stellenbosch University’s Department of Physics, the Department of Higher Education and Training’s Future Professors Programme, the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS), and the Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf).

Abstract

With the invention of lasers, the intensity of light waves was increased by orders of magnitude over what had been achieved with a light bulb or sunlight. This much higher intensity light led to new phenomena being observed, such as violet light coming out when red light went into the material. After Gérard Mourou and I developed chirped pulse amplification, also known as CPA, the intensity again increased by more than a factor of 1,000 and it once again made new types of interactions possible between light and matter. We developed a laser that could deliver short pulses of light that knocked the electrons off their atoms. This new understanding of laser-matter interactions, led to the development of new machining techniques that are used in laser eye surgery or micromachining of glass used in cell phones.

More about Prof. Strickland

Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing chirped pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester in New York State. Together they paved the way toward the most intense laser pulsers ever created. Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of technical staff at Princeton University. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations. ​

For more information, contact Dr Yaseera Ismail at yaseeraismail@sun.ac.za​