Nobel for physics shared by Canadian
Third woman to have won the prize
WATERLOO, Ont. — A Canadian scientist who became only the third woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics said her personal triumph doubles as a sign of progress for her maledominated industry.
Donna Strickland, associate professor at Ontario’s University of Waterloo, was honoured on Tuesday for being half of the team to discover Chirped Pulse Amplification, a technique that underpins today’s short-pulse, high-intensity lasers.
The 59-year-old Guelph, Ont., native made the discovery while completing her PhD at the University of Rochester in New York and will share half of the $1.01-million US prize with her doctoral adviser, French physicist Gérard Mourou. Arthur Ashkin of the United States was the third winner of the 2018 physics prize.
Strickland’s victory not only cemented her own place in Nobel history, but ended a 55-year-long drought for female physicists being recognized by the prize committee. She joins the ranks of Marie Curie, the first woman to claim the honour in 1903, and 1963 winner Maria Goeppert-Mayer.
Strickland said reflecting on Goeppert-Mayer’s career shows how far the scientific field has come in terms of gender parity despite the fact that women still make up only a quarter of attendees at major conferences.
Goeppert-Mayer, whose work was cited in Strickland’s own award-winning efforts, went largely unpaid throughout her career.
“It’s true that a woman hasn’t been given the Nobel Prize since then, but I think things are better for women than they have been,” Strickland told the Canadian Press in an interview. “We should never lose the fact that we are moving forward. We are always marching forward.”
Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences, which chose the winners, described the work as “revolutionary.”
The Chirped Pulse Amplification Technique, first laid out in a 1985 article, was described by the academy as “generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses,” which have become a critical part of corrective eye surgeries, among other uses. Ashkin, the American who developed “optical tweezers,” became the oldest Nobel Prize laureate at age 96.
Strickland said she and Mourou were well aware that they were onto something in 1982 when they began researching ways to allow lasers to perform high-intensity, ultra-short pulses that would not damage the equipment.
The University of Waterloo said Strickland’s win was a “tremendous day” for the school.