Anne L'Huillier
Lund University
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Primary Section: 13, Physics Secondary Section: 33, Applied Physical Sciences Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2018)
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Biosketch
Anne L'Huillier is a French/Swedish physicist working on the interaction between short and intense laser fields with atoms. She is recognized for her studies of high-order harmonics generated in gases, leading to the formation of ultrashort, attosecond, light pulses. She was born in 1958 and raised in Paris, France. She entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Fontenay-aux-Roses in 1977, in mathematics. She was graduate student in physics at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, carrying out experiments at the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA), near Paris. She defended her thesis on multiple multiphoton ionization in 1986. She obtained a permanent researcher position at the CEA the same year. She was postdoc at the Chalmers Institute of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1986 and at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1988. She was visiting scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1993. In 1995 she became Associate Professor at Lund University, then was appointed Professor of Physics in 1997. She is member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2004 and was member of the Nobel committee for Physics 2007-2015. She was elected foreign associate to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Research Interests
Anne L’Huillier’s research, which is both experimental and theoretical, is centered around high-order harmonic generation in gases and its applications. In the time domain, these harmonics correspond to a series of extremely short light pulses, in the extreme ultraviolet spectral range and with duration a few tens or hundreds of attoseconds. Her research deals with attosecond source development and optimization as well as with the use of this radiation for the study of ultrafast (electron) dynamics. Attosecond light sources can be designed for varying goals, e.g. towards high intensity for nonlinear pump/probe experiments or towards high repetition rate, for applications in condensed matter physics. Another active area of research of Anne L’Huillier and her group is the study of the electron dynamics in atomic or molecular systems, following a photoionization event induced by absorption of an attosecond light pulse.
