Margaret Murnane

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Margaret M. Murnane (* 1959 in County Limerick , Ireland ) is an Irish-American physicist ( laser physics , atomic and molecular physics ).

Murnane studied physics from 1977 at University College in Cork , Ireland, and received his doctorate in 1989 from the University of California, Berkeley . In her dissertation with Roger Falcone, which won the Simon Ramo Award from the American Physical Society in 1990, she built a laser with ultrashort pulses of around 100 femtoseconds and used it to generate X-ray pulses. She has been a professor at the University of Colorado since 1999 , where she runs her own laboratory at JILA with her husband, the physicist Henry Kapteyn (who was doing her doctorate at Berkeley around the same time as she and whom she married in 1988). Both worked together in their own laboratory at Washington State University in 1990 and at the University of Michigan from 1996 .

Murnane and Kapteyn succeeded in developing extremely short laser pulses, in the mid-1990s below the 10 femtosecond range and later down to the tenth of a femtosecond range. They used this to study fast processes, for example in molecules. They also found methods for the efficient generation of ultra-short X-ray pulses from the interaction of ultra-short laser pulses with gases. They worked with the Bulgarian theorist Ivan Christov (University of Sofia).

In 1991 she received the Presidential Young Investigator Award. From 1992 to 1994 she was a Sloan Research Fellow . In 1997 she was awarded the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award of the American Physical Society (APS), of which she is a fellow. She was a MacArthur Fellow in 2000 , a Loeb Lecturer at Harvard in 2001, and a Richtmyer Memorial Lecturer at the American Association of Physics Teachers in 2003 . In 2010 she and Henry Kapteyn received the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser Physics and also in 2010 the RW Wood Prize . She was awarded the Willis E. Lamb Prize for 2012, the Frederic Ives Medal for 2017 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute for 2020 .

She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2004), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006), the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Philosophical Society (2015) and an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy (2013).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The abbreviation stands for the old name Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics. The institute is supported by the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology . At JILA are among others Eric Cornell , John Lewis Hall , Deborah Jin .
  2. ^ Members: Margaret M. Murnane. Royal Irish Academy, accessed May 10, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Murnane, Margaret
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Murnane, Margaret M.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish-American physicist (laser physics, atomic and molecular physics)
DATE OF BIRTH 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH County Limerick , Ireland