Abstract:
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded with one half to Arthur Ashkin "for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems" and the other half jointly to Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland "for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses". In this colloquium talk I shall (1) introduce the basic physics of ultra-short pulse lasers, (2) explain why the method invented by Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland, known as chirped pulse amplification, was a breakthrough to producing high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses, and (3) discuss the applications and prospect their method has led to, including high-gradient accelerators, short-pulse X-ray and extreme-UV sources, and frequency-tunable gamma-ray beam.
Brief Bio:
Dr. Jyhpyng Wang is a research fellow of Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences, Academia Sinica, with joint appointments in the physics departments of National Taiwan University and National Central University. He was an early pioneer of femtosecond mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser and led a team to build a 100-TW laser system at National Central University for research in laser accelerator, short-pulse x-ray/extreme-UV sources, and plasma nonlinear optics.