2024 William F. Meggers Award Winner

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Optica Names Nathalie Picqué the 2024 William F. Meggers Award Recipient

Optica is pleased to announce that Nathalie Picqué, Max-Born Institute, Germany, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the William F. Meggers Award. Picqué is honored for pioneering broadband molecular spectroscopy with interfering frequency combs. Her work has opened new areas of research and has great potential for major advances in molecular spectroscopy.

Picqué received her PhD in physics from the University Paris-Saclay, France. She is currently Director at the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy and Professor of Physics at the Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. Previously, she was a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Germany, and a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France.

She is a pioneer in the development and application of techniques of spectroscopy over broad spectral bandwidths with optical frequency combs. These methods include dual-comb spectroscopy and Fourier-transform spectroscopy with a laser frequency comb. She showed how to interrogate and analyze broadband molecular spectra with thousands or millions of comb lines simultaneously. Dual-comb interferometers without moving parts perform direct frequency measurements over a wide span, with no geometric limitations to resolution. They have created new opportunities for precision spectroscopy and for miniaturized spectrometers on photonic chips. Dual-comb spectroscopy has now spread around the world.

Picqué is an Optica Fellow and has received several awards, including the Gentner-Kastler Prize, the Breakthrough Prize in Physical Sciences of Falling Walls, and the DeWitt-Morette Prize of the French Academy of Sciences.

Established in 1970, the Meggers Award is presented for outstanding work in spectroscopy. It honors William F. Meggers for his notable contributions to the field of spectroscopy and metrology, and was endowed by the family of William F. Meggers, several individuals and a number of optical manufacturers.

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