The 2019 Willis E. Lamb Award For attosecond physics.

Awarded January 9th, 2019, at the 49th Winter Colloquium on the Physics of Quantum Electronics.

Paul Corkum, University of Ottawa

For attosecond physics.

Paul Corkum (OC, FRS, FRSC, FRSP) is known for introducing many of the concepts of how intense light pulses interact with atoms, molecules and solids, and confirming the concepts experimentally.  He showed how to make and measure an attosecond pulse and how this new technology could be used to image atomic-scale structure.   Corkum is a member of the Royal Societies of London and Canada and a foreign member of the US National Academy of Science, the Russian Academy of Science and of the Austrian Academy of Science.    Among his awards are the Canadian Association of Physicists’ Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement (1996); the Royal Society of Canada’s Tory Award (2003); the Optical Society’s Charles H. Townes Award (2005); the IEEE’s Quantum Electronics Award (2005); the American Physical Societies’ Schawlow Prize (2006) and the ACS Zewail Award (2010); the Optical Society of America’s Charles Ives award (2014) (the society’s highest award): the Royal Society’s Royal Medal (2017) and the SPIE’s Gold Medal (2018) (the society’s highest honour) and the IOP’s Isaac Newton metal (2018) (the society’s highest honour).   In 2013, Corkum received Israel’s Harvey Prize for Physical Sciences and Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal Prize for Science (Physics).  In 2015 he shared the Russian Academy of Sciences Lomonosov Gold Medal for the natural sciences & humanities (the Academy’s highest award) and was named Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate, for researchers whose work is -- “of Nobel class”.

Bio provided by Paul Corkum, 2020.