Generation of high-intensity ultra-short optical pulses: 2018 Nobel Prize Winners in Physics Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland

Abstract

In the early 1980s, French physicist G. Mourou and his Canadian collaborator D. Strickland solved the problem of power drop by dispersing in time and space the processes of amplification and compression: a method of obtaining super-powerful chirped laser pulses (CPA – chirped pulse amplification). The paper presents brief biographical references to Mourou and Strickland. The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics”: Artur Isidorovich Ashkin (Ashkinazi, born 02.09.1922, USA), half of the prize “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems”; Gerard Albert Mourou and Donna Theo Strickland (became the third woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics) (quarterly premium) “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses”. Since that time all lasers have been built on a new principle: after the amplifiers place a compressor from diffraction bars. Instead of simply amplifying the pulse, it is first spread out on spectral components spread over time, then they are amplified separately, then again assembled into a single pulse. At each point in time, only a fraction of the pulse is amplified, not the entire pulse, allowing for a much higher peak intensity of laser light flow.