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Optics and photonics

Optics and photonics

Donna Strickland gives inside story of her Nobel-prize-winning research

20 Feb 2019 Matin Durrani
Card used to mark lecture by Donna Strickland at the IOP on 19 February 2019 in London
Nobel thoughts: Donna Strickland spoke at the Institute of Physics on 19 February 2019 (Courtesy: Institute of Physics)

“It’s scary when the phone rings at that time.”

So said Donna Strickland at a lecture at the Institute of Physics in central London last night as she recalled the moment last October when her life was to change for ever. It was the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on the phone, calling at 5 a.m. local time to tell her she’d won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics with Gérard Mourou and Arthur Ashkin.

Strickland, who is based at the University of Waterloo in Canada, was told to hold the line, but bizarrely the phone went dead. “Technical glitch”, she recalled. “Something had gone wrong. Then I saw an e-mail saying they were desperately trying to phone me.”

After having the news confirmed, she texted family members, but her daughter didn’t quite believe the message. “She thought mom’s phone had been hacked,” Strickland laughed.

Strickland was awarded the prize for her discovery in 1985 of “chirped pulse amplification” with Mourou, who at the time was her PhD supervisor at the University of Rochester in the US. In a nutshell, the technique involves taking a short, low-energy laser pulse, stretching it to make a long, low-energy pulse, amplifying it to get a long, high-energy pulse, before finally compressing it to get a short, high-energy pulse.

In her lecture, which was held in association with the High Commission of Canada, Strickland gave an entertaining, charming and lucid account of the science behind generating ultrashort, high-intensity optical pulses, starting with Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect, via the discovery of the laser and discussing the subtle distinction between non-linear interactions and multi-photon physics.

She also mentioned some of the numerous applications of CPA. It is, for example, used in industry for high-precision micromachining and in medicine for repairing damaged corneas. Indeed, CPA has been used for 24 million eye operations since 2011, and – although it’s pain free – Strickland winced as she showed a video of one such treatment.

Witty, frank and down-to-earth, Strickland gave some fascinating insights into the “fairytale” Nobel-prize ceremony that she attended in Stockholm last December, including how she ended up accompanying Swedish king Carl Gustaf and spotted The Edge from U2 in the audience, who apparently was a guest of US cancer expert and fellow Nobel laureate James Allison.

Strickland’s lecture was followed by questions the audience, which largely consisted of hand-picked sixth-form students studying physics. I found it a lovely touch for the IOP, which publishes Physics World, to have invited those who will stand to gain the most from such an inspiring figure.

Most of the questions concerned Strickland’s science, which is what she is most passionate about. Inevitably, though, one or two touched on the fact that she’s only the third woman to have won the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Asked by one student whether she had ever suffered from “impostor syndrome”, Strickland said it was “hard to believe that anyone hasn’t had to deal with that.” The answer to feeling an impostor, Strickland said, is to work hard. “It also helps to have a loud voice!” she added.

But why, she wondered, do people – men and women alike – want to become physicists in the first place, given that it’s probably not for the money. Strickland believes it’s all a question of confidence.

“At conferences, men love to say ‘Look what I did!’. Boys are raised to be like that. Women aren’t. We have to push women to say ‘Don’t be demure and not be proud of what you do. Women have to teach other women this.”

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