Quantum Year National Tour – Melbourne
July 7 @ 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
The Australian Institute of Physics is thrilled to welcome Professor Donna Strickland to Australia in July 2025 for the Quantum Year National Tour. Our thanks to Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) for supporting Professor Strickland’s tour as National Partner. This event is free and will be delivered to a general public audience.
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. Prof 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.
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Organising Partners
Thanks to the AIP’s Organising Partners in each city for their support of the Quantum Year National Tour. For Melbourne, RMIT University, RMIT Applied Quantum Technologies and COMBS.
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