CP Exclusive: Nobel laureate Donna Strickland on her win and her work

At that time in the early 80s there were both short pulse lasers and high energy lasers. People wanted high-peak powers, but if you put high-peak powers into your laser, you’d then blow up your laser. That’s why you couldn’t have both high energy and short pulses. Chirped pulse amplification just got around that. It’s a very simple idea.

Did you know, when you made this discovery as a PhD student, that you were breaking new ground?

Yes, we knew that. My very first talk that I ever gave, the very first one that we published in 1985, made a gigawatt of power, but (PhD supervisor and prize co-winner Gerard Mourou) said … ‘when you go give your talk, you say this is the way to make a petawatt laser.’ As a very young student I said ‘you want me to say we have a gigawatt laser but it’s the way to make a petawatt?’ And that’s like six orders of magnitude more. Of course, I knew he was right, it just seemed very bombastic for me to say it in front of the experts of the world. I found that hard.

How has it felt to watch your discovery evolve over the years?

It’s been a lot of fun. There’s still interest in taking the discovery further. In 2010 there was a symposium just to congratulate Gerard and I on 25 years of CPA. People from around the world were there … and they were all trying to say how they were going to be the ones to 10 petawatts. There was an excitement about it. It’s fun to watch, and you think, ‘wow, how does that happen.’

You’re only the third woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics. Was it a fairly male-dominated field when you began?

Yeah, it was, but I sort of ignored that. Possibly that’s why I didn’t get stopped, because I just ignored it all. I actually don’t think I even really noticed it so much. And I loved being the only girl to walk into a bathroom at the big laser conferences and have 30 stalls all to myself. I’ve always gotten paid equal to my colleagues and I feel I’ve been treated equally. I feel that women should start to get to be recognized more because for some reason not all men want to recognize us or not all people, but I think that’s a minority. I think the majority of people are ready to recognize us.

Has there been a bit more gender parity in the field over the course of your career?

We were probably about 10 per cent women going to the laser conferences. Now it’s up to about 25 per cent. It’s getting there. I compare myself now … to Maria Goeppert-Mayer (the second woman to win the Nobel physics prize). I cite her in my thesis, but what I cite her for I don’t think she got paid to do. She just followed her husband the professor around, and they’d let her have an office or they’d let her teach or they’d let her do some things, and yet she won a Nobel Prize. It was only about 10 years before winning the Nobel Prize that she got paid as a scientist. It’s true that a woman hasn’t been given the Nobel Prize since then, but I think things are better for women than they have been. We should never lose the fact that we are moving forward.

What are your thoughts on what your win may do for helping attract girls to science, technology, engineering and math fields?

I have trouble answering that because I think that’s up to each female or girl for herself to see if that would make a difference. I’ve heard enough people say that there’s a need for role models, so that would hopefully help.

Would you be open to being viewed in that light now?

I already have been. There are very few women scientists and very few academic physicists, and we do get asked to play that role. I do put myself out there for that.

Is there a message you have, in light of your win, for aspiring female science researchers?

If you want to do something, get out there and do it. That’s all you can do.

— This interview has been edited and condensed.

Michelle McQuigge, The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

CP Exclusive: Nobel laureate Donna Strickland on her win and her work

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