Gérard Mourou facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Gérard Mourou
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Mourou in 2014
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Gérard Albert Mourou
22 June 1944 Albertville, Occupied France
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| Education | University of Grenoble (BSc, MSc) Pierre and Marie Curie University (PhD) |
| Known for | Chirped pulse amplification |
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| Institutions | École polytechnique ENSTA ParisTech University of Rochester University of Michigan N. I. Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod |
| Doctoral students | Donna Strickland |
Gérard Albert Mourou (born 22 June 1944) is a French scientist. He is a leader in the fields of electrical engineering and lasers.
In 2018, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared it with Donna Strickland. They won for inventing a special technique called chirped pulse amplification. This method helps create super-powerful, very short laser pulses. These pulses can be as strong as a petawatt, which is a huge amount of power!
In 1994, Mourou and his team at the University of Michigan made another discovery. They found that strong laser beams can create "filaments" in the air. These filaments act like tiny tunnels or waveguides for the laser light. This stops the laser beam from spreading out.
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Gérard Mourou's Career
Gérard Mourou has had a long and important career in science. From 2005 to 2009, he was the director of the Applied Optics Laboratory at ENSTA. He is also a professor at the École Polytechnique.
He taught at the University of Michigan for over 16 years. In 1990, he helped start the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science there. Before that, he led a research group in France. He earned his PhD from Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1973.
In 1977, he moved to the United States. He became a professor at the University of Rochester. It was there, with his student Donna Strickland, that they did their Nobel Prize-winning work. They worked at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics.
Inventing Chirped Pulse Amplification
Mourou and Strickland together invented chirped pulse amplification (CPA). This is a way to make very strong, super-short laser pulses. Strickland's PhD research was about creating a very bright laser.
Their invention was a big step forward. They found a clever way to make lasers much more powerful. They stretched out a laser pulse first. This made its power lower. Then, they could make it much stronger using regular tools. After that, they squeezed the pulse back together. This created a super-short, very powerful laser.
This technique, CPA, made it possible to study nature in new ways. It can even create a laser pulse that lasts only one attosecond. That's one-billionth of a billionth of a second! At such tiny timescales, scientists can study what happens inside individual atoms. They can also look closely at chemical reactions.
Winning the Nobel Prize
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On 2 October 2018, Mourou and Donna Strickland received the Nobel Prize in Physics. They shared half of the prize for their work on chirped pulse amplification. The other half went to Arthur Ashkin. He invented "optical tweezers" that can grab tiny particles with laser beams.
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Newspapers like The Guardian and Scientific American explained their work simply. They said it "paved the way for the shortest, most intense laser beams ever created." These super-short, super-sharp laser beams can make very precise cuts.
Today, their technique is used in laser machining. It also helps doctors perform millions of corrective laser eye surgeries. The Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, praised their work. He said it has had a big impact on eye surgery. He also expects it to help with cancer therapy and other physics research in the future.
Awards and Honors
- 1995 – R. W. Wood Prize by the OSA
- 1997 – SPIE Harold E. Edgerton Award
- 2002 – National Academy of Engineering Member
- 2004 – IEEE LEOS Quantum Electronics Award
- 2005 – Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics
- 2009 – Charles Hard Townes Award by the OSA
- 2016 – Frederic Ives Medal
- 2016 – Berthold Leibinger Zukunftspreis
- 2018 – Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science by the American Physical Society
- 2018 – Nobel Prize in Physics, with Arthur Ashkin and Donna Strickland
- 2020 – Honorary Doctorate of Vilnius University
- 25 February 2020 – Honorary Doctorate of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, ceremony
See also
In Spanish: Gérard Mourou para niños
