Gérard Mourou
French physicist (born 1944) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gérard Albert Mourou (French: [ʒeʁaʁ muʁu]; born 22 June 1944)[1][2] is a French scientist and pioneer in the field of electrical engineering and lasers. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, along with Donna Strickland, for the invention of chirped pulse amplification, a technique later used to create ultrashort-pulse, very high-intensity (petawatt) laser pulses.[3]
Quick Facts Born, Education ...
Gérard Mourou | |
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Born | Gérard Albert Mourou (1944-06-22) 22 June 1944 (age 80) |
Education | University of Grenoble (BSc, MSc) Pierre and Marie Curie University (PhD) |
Known for | Chirped pulse amplification |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Institutions | École polytechnique ENSTA ParisTech University of Rochester University of Michigan N. I. Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod |
Doctoral students | Donna Strickland |
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In 1994, Mourou and his team at the University of Michigan discovered that the balance between the self-focusing refraction (see Kerr effect) and self-attenuating diffraction by ionization and rarefaction of a laser beam of terawatt intensities in the atmosphere creates "filaments" that act as waveguides for the beam, thus preventing divergence.