Margaret Murnane

Margaret M. Murnane (* 1959 in County Limerick, Ireland) is an Irish- American physicist (laser physics, atomic and molecular physics ).

Murnane studied physics from 1977 at University College Cork in Ireland and was founded in 1989 at the University of California, Berkeley, PhD. In her dissertation at Roger Falcone, the 1990 Simon Ramo Award of the American Physical Society won, they built a laser with ultra-short pulses of ~ 100 femtoseconds and thus generated X-ray pulses. Since 1999 she is a professor at the University of Colorado, where she. With her husband, the physicist Henry Kapteyn ( of about the same time as she completed her doctorate at Berkeley, whom she married in 1988), a private laboratory at JILA Both worked in 1990 at Washington State University in a separate laboratory together and in 1996 at the University of Michigan.

Murnane and Kapteyn succeeded in the development of ultra- short laser pulses in the mid- 1990s among the 10 femtosecond range, and later to the range of tenths of femtoseconds, and used these to study fast processes, for example, in molecules. They also found methods for the efficient generation of ultrashort X-ray pulses from the interaction of ultrashort laser pulses with gases. They worked together with the Bulgarian theorist Ivan Christov (University of Sofia).

2000 she was a MacArthur Fellow. In 2010 she received with Henry Kapteyn the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser - Physics, 2012, Willis E. Lamb Award and the 1997 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award of the American Physical Society (APS ), the fellow she is. In 1991, she received the Presidential Young Investigator Award and 1992 she was a Sloan Fellow. In 2003, she was Richtmyer Memorial Lecturer of the American Association of Physics Teachers and 2001 Loeb Lecturer at Harvard. In 2010 she received the R. W. Wood Prize.

She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2004), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.