First female Nobel Prize in physics winner for over 50 years

The Swedish Nobel committee has awarded this year's physics prize to a trio of researchers whose discoveries in the field of laser technologies have proved valuable across a wide field of science. The three winners include the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for 55 years, Canadian physicist Donna Strickland, also only the third female physics laureate in history.

Prof Strickland, who is affiliated to Waterloo University in Canada, was honoured for her role in research on amplifying ultrashort laser pulses, and shares the award with her colleague Gerard Mourou, of the Ecole Polytechnic Palaiseau in France and the University of Michigan, while also honoured is Arthur Ashkin, who developed optical tweezers at Bell Laboratories.

Strickland and Mourou developed their technique, called chirped pulse amplification (CPA), in 1985. It was the foundation of Strickland's doctoral thesis at the University of Rochester in the US, where Mourou was her supervisor. The technique created the shortest and most intense laser pulses ever generated. In achieving this, they had to solve a major problem: previous short pulses generated by other techniques contained so much energy that they destroyed the material that amplified them.