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Ursula Keller wins the European Inventor Lifetime Achievement Award 2018!

180424_Lifetime-Achievement-Award
ETH physicist Ursula Keller has received the European Inventor Award in Paris for her research into ultrafast lasers. It is Europe’s highest accolade for inventors from around the world.

Since 2006, the European Patent Office has been presenting the annual Inventor Award to people whose ideas and creativity have significantly advanced the development of innovative products. This year’s recipients include a physicist from ETH Zurich: Ursula Keller, Professor of Ultrafast Laser Physics, was selected by the jury in the lifetime achievement category for her work on ultrafast lasers.

Keller's semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM), which she invented in 1992 while working at AT&T Bell Laboratories, provided a practical method to create extremely short, energetic bursts of laser light. Thanks to her developments, lasers can now produce short bursts ranging in duration from picoseconds (10-12 seconds) to femtoseconds (10-15 seconds) and repeating up to several billion times a second.

Ultra-fast Femto-Lasik for eye surgery is able to make tiny incisions with no risk of damaging nearby tissue. Similarly, cancerous tissue can be cut away without searing neighbouring healthy cells. And the technology has opened up numerous machining and material-processing applications that are vital to the automotive and electronics industries.

In her role as a physics professor at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, Keller has further refined and developed the SESAM concept, widening it to include more types of laser; in addition, she has developed precise scientific measuring equipment that explores the wonders of the universe down to the quantum level.


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