Short pulses, giant steps. Optica Fellow and 2023 Nobel Laureate in #Physics Anne L’Huillier, the first woman to receive the Max Born Award, was also one of the first researchers to see the potential to use the extreme ultraviolet pulses that are generated through high harmonic generation to produce even shorter pulses. We asked her about her work. "How does high-harmonic generation let us study these extremely short, attosecond timescales?" "When you generate high-order harmonics by focusing a laser in a gas, the radiation is emitted, in the time domain, as trains of attosecond pulses. And these attosecond pulses can be used to study ultrafast dynamics in matter. This is what I’ve been doing in the last decade or so—developing techniques to study dynamics of photoionization in atomic systems." #WomenInSTEM #February11 #IDWGS