Researcher

Anne L'Huillier

Profile

Anne L'Huillier is a French-Swedish physicist and professor of atomic physics at Lund University whose discovery and characterization of high-harmonic generation laid the experimental foundation for attosecond science. Working at CEA Saclay in 1987, she observed that an intense infrared laser passing through a noble gas produces a comb of high-order harmonics extending far into the extreme ultraviolet, and she spent the following decades developing the theory and measurements that turned this curiosity into a controllable source of attosecond light pulses capable of resolving the motion of electrons inside atoms and molecules. For this body of work she shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz, becoming the fifth woman ever to win the physics prize. Her Lund group operates one of Europe's leading attosecond laboratories and has been continuously supported by European Research Council Advanced Grants and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, while coordinating pan-European Marie Curie training networks such as ATTOFEL and MEDEA that supply instrumentation and ultrafast-laser vendors with a steady pipeline of trained users. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and sits on its Nobel Committee for Physics, making her laboratory an unusually well-funded and influential customer for ultrafast laser systems, vacuum-UV optics, and time-resolved spectroscopy hardware.

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