“The main practical application of CPA so far has been in the eye surgery. It was the first one, and I think it is the one that is used by the most people for something practical.”
Donna Strickland on the phone this morning with Göran Hansson of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, after learning that she had shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. CPA is chirped pulse amplification, a technique for producing incredibly short pulses of laser light of very high intensity. A few minutes before talking with Strickland, Hansson made the announcement: “This year’s prize is about tools made from light. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has today decided to award the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics with one half to Arthur Ashkin for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems and the other half jointly to Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra short optical pulses. And Arthur Ashkin was born in 1922 in New York City. He made his remarkable invention at the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey in the United States. Gérard Mourou was born in 1944 in Albertville in France. And he’s currently at the École Polytechnique in Palaiseau in France, and also affiliated with the University of Michigan in the United States.