Canada's Donna Strickland shares Nobel physics prize Posted: October 2, 2018

Waterloo University professor Donna Strickland was awarded a 1/4 portion of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics for her discovery of ultra fast and ultra high power laser pulses in the 1980s while she was working on her PhD at the University of Rochester in the USA. She shares half the Nobel Prize with Gérard Mourou, who was her faculty advisor at the time. Strickland was born in Guelph and continues her research on lasers today. To get an idea of how short and powerful her "chirped pulse amplification" technique is, imagine a hundred thousand billion light bulbs all flashing at once but for only a billionth of a billionth of a second. This technique is now used in most high powered lasers such as the kind that are used for eye surgery and for countless other applications.  Wikipedia page on Donna Strickland  Nobel Prize announcement of Strickland and Mourou's research.