UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Tuesday, 16 June 2015 at 11.30 a.m.
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR PADRAIG DUNNE on 16 June 2015, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa on MARGARET MURNANE
President, Honoured Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is a pleasure and an honour for me to be part of this conferring of an honorary doctorate upon Professor Margaret Murnane, Distinguished Professor and a Fellow at JILA, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, in the United States. There are many qualities to Professor Murnane that I could cite here, however I will dwell upon but a few.
Professor Murnane’s distinguished work has focused on the development of lasers (in the broad sense) which can operate at the fundamental limits of speed and stability. She designed the first laser able to pulse in the low trillionths of a second range (10 femtoseconds) which allows time almost to be halted to capture a freeze-frame view of the world. In the late 1990s she developed a table-top Extreme Ultraviolet laser using very short infra-red laser pulses to generate coherent beams of EUV radiation in capillaries filled with gas. The output EUV beam has all the coherent, directed properties of a laser - rather than the incoherent, light bulb-like, properties of the plasma sources and x-ray tubes used until then in science, medicine and security. More recently, her research has led to the development of 100 as-scale soft x-ray pulses, which, even to a physicist, were in the realms of the fantastic up to ten years ago. To put it in perspective, a light pulse, moving at the speed of light (sic) will only travel 1/30th of a micron in 100 as. The shortest pulses reported by the researchers working with Professor Murnane are as short as 70 as. At these timescales the motion of nuclei in diatomic molecules becomes resolved, much in the way that a hummingbird’s wing movements were finally resolved with the advent of fast flash photography.
Professor Murnane was born in Limerick and is a graduate of University College Cork, where she achieved B.Sc and M.Sc degrees in physics. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and moved to Colorado in 1999, via Washington State University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She has received many honours, including the 2011 RDS Irish Times Boyle Medal and is a fellow of many scientific organisations. Prof Murnane has authored or co-authored over 200 publications, been cited over 15,000 times, and has made the front cover of premier scientific journals. To quote from her Boyle medal citation “Margaret Murnane is an international leader in her field and has made a significant contribution to laser and x-ray science. Not only is her fundamental research groundbreaking in itself, the application of her work has the potential to make a significant impact across virtually all scientific and medical disciplines.”
For example, Prof Murnane’s research in the early 1990s led to game-changing laser developments in the femtosecond regime using Ti:Sapphire as the lasing medium and revolutionising the ultrafast laser world. This is typical of her career, which is leading both in terms of laser design and laser applications to fundamental science. With her husband, she spun out a company that supplies lasers, components and light sources to the scientific community and beyond, with both design and ethos firmly grounded in her research and that of the KM research group. This company has provided employment for members of the research group, among others.
In 2003 I had the pleasure of visiting Prof Murnane’s research group, which she runs with her husband, Henry Kaptyen, in Boulder, Colorado. It was inspiring to see how a large, world-class research group went about its activities, and to see how it was run very much as a large family. One of the really impressive aspects to Prof Murnane’s research is the inclusive and complete way in which the group is run, and the leadership shown to young female researchers, at what can be a critical point in their career. It is further testament to her research that the KM group alumni are to be found in either academic posts throughout the world or in leading industrial companies in areas close to or devolved from the research conducted at Boulder.
For more than the last decade, Prof Murnane has been a very strong supporter of Science and Physics in Ireland and at UCD. She has come to give keynote talks at conferences and workshops here, in addition to other inputs, which can never be easy in a schedule as compressed and dense as hers.
In summary however, it is for her remarkable success in the area of Ultrafast Optical Physics that she receives this Honorary Doctorate:
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hanc meam filiam, quam scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneam esse quae admittatur, honoris causa, ad Gradum Doctoratus Scientiae; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.