User:Aruizmontoya01/Donna Strickland

Donna Theo Strickland, CC (born 27 May 1959) is a Canadian optical physicist and pioneer in the field of pulsed lasers. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, together with Gérard Mourou, for the invention of chirped pulse amplification. She is a professor at the University of Waterloo.

She served as fellow, vice president, and president of The Optical Society, and is currently chair of their Presidential Advisory Committee. In 2018, she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women.

Contents

 * 1Early life and education
 * 2Career
 * 3Awards and recognition
 * 3.1Nobel Prize[edit]
 * 3.2Order of Canada
 * 4Selected publications
 * 5Personal life

Early life and education[edit]
Strickland was born on 27 May 1959, in Guelph, Ontario, Canada to Edith J. (née Ranney), an English teacher, and Lloyd Strickland, an electrical engineer. After graduating from Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute, she decided to attend McMaster University because its engineering physics program included lasers and electro-optics, areas of particular interest. At McMaster, she was one of three women in a class of twenty-five. Strickland graduated with a B.Eng. degree in engineering physics in 1981.

Strickland studied for her graduate degree in The Institute of Optics, receiving a Ph.D. degree from the University of Rochester in 1989. She conducted her doctoral research at the associated Laboratory for Laser Energetics, supervised by Gérard Mourou. Strickland and Mourou worked to develop an experimental setup that could raise the peak power of laser pulses, to overcome a limitation, that when the maximal intensity of laser pulses reached gigawatts per square centimetre, self-focusing of the pulses severely damaged the amplifying part of the laser. Their 1985 technique of chirped pulse amplification stretched out each laser pulse both spectrally and in time before amplifying it, then compressed each pulse back to its original duration, generating ultrashort optical pulses of terawatt to petawatt intensity. Using chirped pulse amplification allowed smaller high-power laser systems to be built on a typical laboratory optical table, as "table-top terawatt lasers". The work received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Science
Donna Strickland and her group packed the same energy that the common laser had before into a much shorter time. The 1 mJ of energy per second that was so revolutionary when the laser was first invented, she was able to pack into 1 picosecond, therefore achieving that the concentration of photons increased. Having the concentration of electrons increased, allowed for each electron to meet with that many more atoms and instead of releasing an that many electrons with the same low energy, they were able to release a single electron with said fold of energy. At the time that she started the project in the early 1980s, there were short pulse lasers, and there were big-energy lasers but not a laser that could do both. The problem was that when inputting a short pulse into big-energy lasers, the processes tehy wanted were happening inside the laser rods and drilled holes through them.

Career[edit]
Strickland's ultrafast laser group at University of Waterloo, in June 2017

From 1988 to 1991, Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council of Canada, where she worked with Paul Corkum in the Ultrafast Phenomena Section, which had the distinction at that time of having produced the most powerful short-pulse laser in the world. She worked in the laser division of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1991 to 1992 and joined the technical staff of Princeton University's Advanced Technology Center for Photonics and Opto-electronic Materials in 1992. She joined the University of Waterloo in 1997 as an assistant professor. She became the first full-time female professor in physics at the University of Waterloo. Strickland is currently a professor, leading an ultrafast laser group that develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations. She has described herself as a "laser jock":"I think it's because we thought we were good with our hands. As an experimentalist, you need to understand the physics, but you also need to be able to actually make something work, and the lasers were very finicky in those days."Strickland's recent work has focused on pushing the boundaries of ultrafast optical science to new wavelength ranges such as the mid-infrared and the ultraviolet, using techniques such as two-colour or multi-frequency methods, as well as Raman generation. She is also working on the role of high-power lasers in the microcrystalline lens of the human eye, during the process of micromachining of the eye lens to cure presbyopia.

Strickland became a fellow of The Optical Society in 2008. She served as its vice president and president in 2011 and 2013 respectively, and was a topical editor of its journal Optics Letters from 2004 to 2010. She is currently the chair of The Optical Society's Presidential Advisory Committee. She is a member of and previously served as a board member and Director of Academic Affairs for the Canadian Association of Physicists.

Strickland had not applied to be a full professor prior to her Nobel prize, but in October 2018, she told the BBC that she had subsequently applied and was promoted to full professorship at the University of Waterloo.

Awards and recognition[edit]
Strickland, 2016


 * 1998 – Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship
 * 1999 – Premier's Research Excellence Award
 * 2000 – Cottrell Scholars Award from Research Corporation
 * 2008 – Fellow of The Optical Society
 * 2019 – Companion of the Order of Canada

Nobel Prize[edit][edit]
On 2 October 2018, Strickland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for her work on chirped pulse amplification with her doctoral adviser Gérard Mourou. Arthur Ashkin received the other half of the Prize for unrelated work on optical tweezers. She became the third woman ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, after Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963.

Strickland and Mourou published their pioneering work "Compression of amplified chirped optical pulses" in 1985, while Strickland was still a doctoral student under Mourou. Their invention of chirped pulse amplification for lasers at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Rochester led to the development of the field of high-intensity ultrashort pulses of light beams. Because the ultrabrief and ultrasharp light beams are capable of making extremely precise cuts, the technique is used in laser micromachining, laser surgery, medicine, fundamental science studies, and other applications. It has enabled doctors to perform millions of corrective laser eye surgeries. She said that after developing the technique they knew it would be a significant discovery.

When she received the Nobel Prize, many commentators were surprised that she had not reached the rank of full professor. In response, Strickland said that she had "never applied" for a professorship; "it doesn't carry necessarily a pay raise… I never filled out the paper work… I do what I want to do and that wasn't worth doing."

Order of Canada[edit]
Strickland was appointed as a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2019, one of Canada's highest civilian honours.

Selected publications[edit]
Strickland, Donna; Mourou, Gerard (1985). "Compression of amplified chirped optical pulses". Optics Communications. 56 (3): 219–221. Bibcode:1985OptCo..56..219S. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.673.148. doi:10.1016/0030-4018(85)90120-8. ISSN 0030-4018.

Maine, P.; Strickland, D.; Bado, P.; Pessot, M.; Mourou, G. (1988). "Generation of ultrahigh peak power pulses by chirped pulse amplification". IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics. 24 (2): 398–403. Bibcode:1988IJQE...24..398M. doi:10.1109/3.137. ISSN 0018-9197.

Strickland, D.; Corkum, P. B. (1994). "Resistance of short pulses to self-focusing". Journal of the Optical Society of America B. 11 (3): 492–497. Bibcode:1994JOSAB..11..492S. doi:10.1364/JOSAB.11.000492.

Personal life [edit]
Strickland is married to Douglas Dykaar, an electrical engineer. They have two children. Strickland's daughter Hannah is a graduate student in astrophysics at the University of Toronto. Strickland's son Adam is studying comedy at Humber College. Strickland is an active member of The United Church of Canada.

Activism
Donna Strickland does not believe that she has ever been treated differently than her male counterparts. She was surprised with how much attention the fact that she is a woman got and said to The Guardian "I don’t see myself as a woman in science. I see myself as a scientist. I didn’t think that would be the big story. I thought the big story would be the science". In a similar manner, and for said reasons that she has not been treated differently than her male peers she claims she can't be a role model to those who have suffered discrimination in a STEM-related workfield as she said in an interview with Times Higher Education (THE) "I can't put myself in their shoes. So, I feel like I can’t really be a role model for people who have struggled that way." She is definitely aware