October 02, 2018 | From Laser Focus World:
Nobel Prize 2018 awarded ‘for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics’
The second half of the prize will be equally shared by Gérard Mourou and Strickland “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses.” This method is well known as chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) and it has revolutionized the generation of energetic ultrashort laser pulses. Laser Focus World Senior Editor John Wallace gave a good overview on the technology and its devices in 2015.
Amplified femtosecond lasers for micromachining became an option in the early 1990s, also inspired by Mourou: “Dr. Gérard Mourou, then a professor at the University of Michigan and a founder of the MXR portion of what became Clark-MXR in 1992, was the first to recognize that femtosecond pulses of light ablated material in a more deterministic manner and with less heat-affected zone (HAZ) than longer laser pulses,” said Bill Clark from Clark-MXR in an interview.