2011 EDITION

18
PR. ANNE
L’HUILLIER
Lund University, SWEDEN
Laureate for Europe
The Fastest Cameras ever made
To capture the movement of an electron in an atom, you
need a “camera” with a shutter speed of a billionth of a
billionth of a second. We have now entered the timescale
of the attosecond, which is to the second what the second
is to the age of the universe, estimated at about 13.7 billion
years.
For a long time, most of the extremely fast molecular events
that form the basis of important natural phenomena like
photosynthesis or of technological devices like microchips
were invisible to experimental science, simply because we
did not have the ability to capture events on such short
timescales. Thanks to the research of Professor Anne
L’Huillier and other scientists, we have developed the tools
to study the ultrafast processes that form the foundation
for most of our observations of the natural world.
The Key to Ultrafast Pulses
generating ultrafast light pulses is no easy task. The
laws of physics dictate that an extremely short pulse of
light will be a mixture of many different wavelengths; in
physics parlance, it has a large bandwidth. For years,
the problem of obtaining such a large bandwidth
represented a major roadblock to ultrafast science.
At the end of the 1980s, however, Anne L’Huillier, then
a young researcher at the Centre d’Etudes de Saclay
in France, stumbled onto the solution to this problem.
By focusing an intense pulse of laser light into a gas,
high-order harmonics of the laser light – similar to the
harmonics of a musical instrument – were generated
and light of the appropriate bandwidth was obtained.
Since the mid-1990s, Anne L’Huillier and her
colleagues have continued to study these processes
from a theoretical and experimental perspective in
Lund, Sweden.