Gérard Mourou

Gérard Mourou (born June 22, 1944, Albertville, France) French physicist who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of chirped pulse amplification (CPA), a method of making pulses of laser light of high power and short duration. He shared the prize with American physicist Arthur Ashkin and Canadian physicist Donna Strickland.

Mourou received a diploma in physics from the University of Grenoble Alpes in 1967. He then worked on his doctoral thesis at Laval University in Quebec City, and he received his doctorate from Pierre and Marie Curie University (now Sorbonne University) in Paris in 1973.

Britannica Quiz

Inventors and Inventions

Mourou had a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at San Diego and spent three years at the École Polytechnique in Paris. He then joined the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester.

In the 1970s the peak power that could be delivered in a short pulse of laser light reached a limit beyond which further amplification of the pulse would damage the instrument. In 1985 Mourou and Strickland, who was his graduate student, devised CPA, a method to generate short powerful laser pulses. The pulse was stretched to reduce its peak power. (When the pulse was stretched, its frequency changed into a pattern called a chirp, hence the name of the method.) That pulse was then safely amplified. The pulse was then compressed, amplifying it still more. CPA has come to be used throughout science, industry, and medicine, where it is the basis of LASIK eye surgery.

In 1988 Mourou joined the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he founded the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. He returned to France in 2005 and was director of the Laboratory of Applied Optics at the École Polytechnique until 2008. He advanced laser science in Europe through his proposal of the Extreme Light Infrastructure, which consists of three facilities with extremely powerful lasers in the Czech Republic, Romania, and Hungary.