2023
Paul Corkum
Physicist’s groundbreaking work in attosecond science garners BBVA Foundation award
2023
Physicist’s groundbreaking work in attosecond science garners BBVA Foundation award
Paul Corkum has won the prestigious BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for his pioneering work in the development of a type of physics called attosecond science. He shares the award with European physicists Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier.
The University of Ottawa researcher and his colleagues have shown how to observe and control the motion of electrons in atoms, molecules and solids with ultrashort light pulses on time scales of about one hundred attoseconds. One attosecond lasts one billionth of a billionth of a second – approximately the time for light to travel across an atom.
“We’ve learned how to make the fastest measurements in the world; the fastest measurements that humans can make by a factor of 100 over what it was before. In the process, we found a way to force lasers to make soft x-rays, where you would not use lasers before – you would have used something more complicated.”
This time scale was previously inaccessible to experimental studies due to the lack of light pulses with short enough duration.
“These groundbreaking contributions have opened exciting new frontiers in different areas, including atomic physics, photochemistry and materials science,” said the BBVA Foundation award jury in announcing the winners.
Dr. Corkum is a principal research officer at the National Research Council (NRC), and co-director of the NRC-uOttawa Joint Centre for Extreme Photonics. In 2022, Dr. Corkum won the Wolf Prize in Physics, along with Drs. Krausz and l’Huillier.
In his acceptance speech at the BBVA awards ceremony in Spain, Dr. Corkum thanked numerous Canadian institutions that have supported his work, including the NRC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Canada Research Chairs program and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
