Margaret Murnane

Margaret Mary Murnane (born 1959) is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, having moved there in 1999, with past positions at the University of Michigan and Washington State University. She is currently Director of the STROBE NSF Science and Technology Center, and is among the foremost active researchers in laser science and technology. Her interests and research contributions span topics including atomic, molecular, and optical physics, nanoscience, laser technology, materials and chemical dynamics, plasma physics, and imaging science. Her work has earned her multiple awards including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship award in 2000, the Frederic Ives Medal/Quinn Prize in 2017, the highest award of The Optical Society, and the 2021 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics.
Early life.
Born and raised in County Limerick, Ireland, Murnane became interested in physics through her father who was a primary school teacher. She received her B.A. and M.S. from University College, Cork. She moved to the United States to study at the University of California at Berkeley where she earned her PhD in 1989. She is married to physics professor Henry Kapteyn. They work together and operate their own lab at JILA at the University of Colorado.
Work.
Murnane has co-authored more than 500 articles in peer reviewed journals, with her work receiving ~35000 cites. Margaret is a founder of the field of ultrafast x-ray science, having made transformational contributions to this area of research in every decade since the 1980s. In their lab, Murnane, Kapteyn, and their students make lasers whose beams flash like a strobe light – except that each flash is a trillion times faster. These lasers, like camera flashes, make it possible to record the motions of atoms in chemical reactions, and of atoms and electrons in materials systems. Some of her lasers can generate pulses of less than 12 femtoseconds. Using the very high peak power that it is possible to create with a femtosecond laser, it becomes possible to coherently upconvert light to much shorter wavelengths, in the extreme ultraviolet and soft x-ray region of the spectrum. This high harmonic generation process makes possible for the first time what is essentially a tabletop-scale x-ray laser light source. Prof. Murnane was the first to explore the use of femtosecond lasers for x-ray generation, and has made substantive pioneering contributions to many aspects of this area of research, including the science and fundamental understanding of the high harmonic process, the laser technology required to use this process to implement practical tabletop light sources for applications, and in applying this new source to make fundamental discoveries in areas ranging from basic atomic and chemical dynamics, to materials dynamics, to nanoimaging. She is also co-founder of the laser company KMLabs, Inc., for which Intel Capital is a co-investor, and which has commercialized these technologies for research and possible industrial applications in nanometrology.