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Photo of Anne L'Hullier stood beneath a tree in autumn colours

Anne L'Huillier is a Swedish/French researcher in attosecond science at Lund University in Sweden. During the first part of her career, she worked at the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, in Saclay, France, first as a PhD student until 1986, then as a permanent researcher until 1995. She was postdoc at Chalmers Institute of Technology, Gothenburg. Sweden in 1986, and at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA in 1988, before moving to Lund in 1995.

She became a full professor in 1997. Her research, both theoretical and experimental, is centered around high-order harmonic generation in gases and its applications, in particular in attosecond science. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 together with Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz for “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”.

About the lecture

When an intense laser interacts with a gas of atoms, high-order harmonics are generated. In the time domain, this radiation forms a train of extremely short light pulses, of the order of 100 attoseconds. Attosecond pulses allow the study of the dynamics of electrons in atoms and molecules, using pump-probe techniques. This presentation will highlight some of the key steps of the field of attosecond science.

The 2024 Rochester Lecture will take place at 4pm on 27th November in the Ph8 Lecture Theatre of the Rochester Building, Durham University Science Site.