Picqué Wins Beller Lectureship Award

Dr. Nathalie Picqué has received the 2010 Beller Lectureship Award "for pioneering work on the application of laser frequency combs to molecular spectroscopy."

The Beller Lectureship Award was endowed by Esther Hoffman Beller for the purpose of bringing distinguished non-US physicists from abroad as invited speakers at American Physical Society (APS) meetings. The award was presented to Picqué in March at this year’s APS Meeting in Portland, Ore. She is the fourth French recipient of this distinction, after Professors Serge Haroche in 1996, Pierre Gilles de Gennes in 2006 and Michel Dyakonov in 2009.

Picqué's research focus lies in molecular and laser physics, including in particular Fourier transform spectroscopy, laser frequency combs and precision measurements in molecular spectroscopy. She has done much work developing ways to use laser frequency combs in Fourier transform spectroscopy. One of her projects is the combination of cavity enhancement and frequency comb spectroscopy for molecular trace gas analysis.

She has already received the 2007 Bronze Medal of the CNRS (best young scientist of the year in the field "Optics and Lasers, Atomic and Molecular Physics, Hot Plasmas" in France), and the 2008 Jean Jerphagnon Prize.

A permanent senior research scientist with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), Picqué is currently on long-term leave at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München (Munich), where she works in the Laser Spectroscopy Division of Professor Theodor W. Hänsch.

Picqué was born on December 2, 1973 in France. She obtained her doctoral degree in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics in 1998 from the Université de Paris-Sud (Orsay, France). She was appointed as a permanent research scientist with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in 2000. Starting in 2005, she became a scientific director at the Laboratoire de Photophysique Moléculaire (Orsay, France).

For more information, visit: www.mpq.mpg.de