Prize Recipient

Anne L'Huillier
Lund University

"For pioneering experimental and theoretical work leading to the discovery of high harmonic generation in gases and the micro- and macroscopic physics responsible for it, and for controlling the phenomenon to create and analyze attosecond pulse trains to probe ultrafast electron dynamics in matter."

Anne L'Huillier is a Swedish/French researcher in attosecond science. She was born in Paris in 1958, and defended her PhD at the University Pierre et Marie Curie in 1986. She was then permanently employed as a researcher at the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, in Saclay, France until 1995. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Chalmers Institute of Technology, Gothenburg (1986), University of Southern California (1988), and a visiting scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1993). In 1995, she moved to Lund University, Sweden, and became a full professor in 1997. Her research, which includes both theory and experiment, deals with the interaction between atoms and intense laser light, and in particular the generation of high-order harmonics of the laser light, which, in the time domain, consists of trains of attosecond pulses. Currently, her research group works on attosecond source development and optimization as well as on applications, for example, the measurement of photoionization dynamics in atomic systems. She has gotten several awards for her research, e.g. the 2011 L’Oréal-Unesco award for women in science and the 2021 Max Born prize from Optica. In 2022, she shared the Wolf Prize in Physics and the BBVA Award for Basic Sciences with P. Corkum and F. Krausz. She is a member of the Swedish, American, Austrian, French, and Italian Academies of Sciences.