Gérard Mourou

Gérard Albert Mourou (; born 22 June 1944) 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.

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.

Career Mourou was born on 22 June 1944 in Albertville, France. Mourou obtained a PhD degree from Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1973. He then moved to the United States, spending a year as a postdoctoral student at the University of California San Diego. He later became a professor at the University of Rochester in 1977, where he and his then student Donna Strickland produced their Nobel prize-winning work in the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the university in the 1980s. The pair co-invented chirped pulse amplification, a "method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses". Strickland's doctoral thesis was on "development of an ultra-bright laser and an application to multi-photon ionization".

Mourou joined the University of Michigan in 1988, where he became the founding director of the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science in 1990 or 1991. He subsequently returned to France as a professor at the École polytechnique to direct the Laboratoire d'optique appliquée at ENSTA from 2005 to 2009 and develop the Extreme Light Infrastructure project from 2007 on.

In October 2024, he was appointed as a Chair Professor at Peking University. He is also the A. D. Moore Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. They shared half of the Prize, while the other half was awarded to Arthur Ashkin for his invention of "optical tweezers that grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells with their laser beam fingers".

Mourou and Strickland found that stretching a laser out reduced its peak power, which could then be greatly amplified using normal instruments. It could then be compressed to create the short-lived, highly powerful lasers they were after. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged the achievements of Mourou and Strickland: "Their innovative work can be found in applications including corrective eye surgery, and is expected to have a significant impact on cancer therapy and other physics research in the future".

Controversy At the time he received the Nobel prize, a publicity video filmed in 2010 to represent the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI), went viral. It featured female students swaying around Mourou and losing their lab coats. It was widely criticized, included by the Nobel committee for its representation of women in sciences. Mourou commented it was intended as humoristic, and added: "I am not very proud of this video".

Awards and honors 1995 – R. W. Wood Prize by the OSA 1997 – SPIE Harold E. Edgerton Award 2002 – National Academy of Engineering Member 2004 – IEEE LEOS Quantum Electronics Award 2005 – Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics 2009 – Charles Hard Townes Award by the OSA 2016 – Frederic Ives Medal 2016 – Berthold Leibinger Zukunftspreis 2018 – Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science by the American Physical Society 2018 – Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Arthur Ashkin and Donna Strickland 25 February 2020 – Honorary Doctorate of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, ceremony

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