Quantum Year National Tour – Canberra
July 10 @ 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
The Australian Institute of Physics is thrilled to welcome Professor Donna Strickland to Australia in July 2025. In Canberra, the Australian Academy of Science will host Professor Strickland FAA FRS Nobel Laureate, to the Shine Dome during her tour of Australia for the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. As part of this lecture and fireside chat, Professor Strickland will be formally admitted as a Fellow of the Academy. This public lecture will share her remarkable work leading to her Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018.
Our thanks to Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) for supporting Donna’s tour as National Partner.
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About the Quantum Year National Tour
With the invention of lasers, the intensity of a light wave was increased by orders of magnitude over what had been achieved with a light bulb or sunlight. This much higher intensity led to new phenomena being observed, such as violet light coming out when red light went into the material. After Professor Gérard Mourou and I developed chirped pulse amplification, also known as CPA, the intensity again increased by more than a factor of 1,000 and it once again made new types of interactions possible between light and matter. We developed a laser that could deliver short pulses of light that knocked the electrons off their atoms. This new understanding of laser-matter interactions led to the development of new machining techniques that are used in laser eye surgery or micromachining of glass used in cell phones.
About Professor Strickland
Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 for developing chirped pulse amplification with Professor Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Prof Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester.
She earned a B.Eng. from McMaster University and a PhD in optics from the University of Rochester. Professor Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of technical staff at Princeton University. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations. She was named a 2021 Hagler Fellow of Texas A&M University and sits on the Growth Technology Advisory Board of Applied Materials.
Organising Partners
Thanks to the AIP’s organising partner, Australian Academy of Science for their support in Canberra of the Professor Donna Strickland Quantum Year National Tour. The Academy would like to recognise the Australian Institute of Physics, the Department of Defence Science and Technology and the Canadian High Commission for their support of this event.
