Strickland gets royal treatment in Sweden
She’s the third female physicist in history to be awarded the Nobel Prize
From accepting her Nobel Prize in physics to delivering her Nobel lecture and dining with Swedish royalty, physicist Donna Strickland has had an incredible week.
The University of Waterloo professor is the third woman in history to be awarded the prize in physics, which she formally accepted from the king of Sweden, Carl XV1 Gustaf, in Stockholm on Monday.
On a conference call from Sweden with Canadian media on Tuesday, Strickland offered a few details of her trip, which included being escorted into the Nobel banquet by the king, who she was seated next to for dinner.
“I think getting to meet the royal family was an unbelievable treat, I mean very few people get the opportunity,” she said, adding she and the king were first to walk into the banquet.
“My sister said that almost brought her to tears because she had no idea that would happen, that I would be first in the procession like that,” said Strickland.
The 59-year-old physicist also spoke of her own royal treatment since arriving at an airport in Sweden on Dec. 5. “Very surreal,” she said. “I was whisked off in a limousine here to the Grand Hotel, which is a magnificent five-star hotel that I get to stay at and I have an attaché from the foreign service, who happened to be Canadian — both Swedish and Canadian,” she said.
“She asked for me to be the person that (she) was the attaché to and she looks after me ... telling me where to go, (where) to be, how to dress.”
On the day of the Nobel Prize ceremony, Strickland’s attaché helped save the day when Strickland and her husband forgot the tickets to the award ceremony.
“That was a little bit of a kerfuffle, just to try to get into the prize ceremony, but luckily the attaché looked after it and we got in, and luckily we both had our passports with us,” she said.
“Once people start looking after you, I quit thinking about any detail.”
With the attaché’s help, Strickland made it into the Stockholm Concert Hall with her husband. She was also allowed to bring 14 guests of her choosing. “I obviously brought my spouse and then I brought my son and daughter and my sister and brother,” said Strickland.
She also invited along two people who helped her develop chirped pulse amplification (CPA) in the 1980s — the high intensity, short-pulsed laser she and physicist Gérard Mourou were awarded the Nobel for.
One of those people was Steve Williamson, a person Strickland had spoken about just after learning she won the prize in October.
At the time she told the Record that she had put Williamson’s name on the Nobel-prize winning CPA paper in the 1980s, but he had taken his name off the paper as he didn’t feel he did enough.
Strickland’s other guests of honour came from the institutions where she has used CPA, including University of Waterloo and the University of Rochester, N.Y. where she developed the laser with Mourou. She also brought along a representative from the Optical Society, of which she is a member and served as a past president.
As part of her week, she delivered a Nobel lecture about her prizewinning research.