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Professor Anne L'Huillier awarded Wolf Prize in Physics

Anne L'Huillier
Anne L'Huillier

The Wolf Prize in Physics has been awarded to Anne L'Huillier at Lund University, Paul Corkum at the University of Ottawa, and Ferenc Krausz at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. They were selected for pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics.

The recipients share the prize for "pioneering and novel work in the fields of ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics and for demonstrating time-resolved imaging of electron motion in atoms, molecules, and solids."

Anne L'Huillier is a professor of Atomic Physics at Lund University. In her research, Anne L'Huillier uses laser technology to create ultra-short light pulses that make it possible to peek into the microcosm. The pulses are unbelievably short: an attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second.

With these "camera flashes" it is possible to study the movements of electrons inside atoms and molecules. Her research group conducts experiments that provide a new basic scientific understanding of the dynamics inside the atoms, for example when an atom is ionized.

Anne L'Huillier is a French/Swedish physicist working on the interaction between short and intense laser fields with atoms.  Born in Paris in 1958, she defended her thesis on multiple multiphoton ionizationn in1986, at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris and Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA). She obtained a permanent researcher position at the CEA the same year. She was a postdoc at the Chalmers Institute of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1986 and at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1988. She was a visiting scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1993. In 1995, she became an Associate Professor at Lund University, then was appointed Professor of Physics in 1997. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2004.