Long Wavelength Mid-Infrared using Two-Color CPA Lasers 

Donna Strickland received her B. Eng. from McMaster University and her PhD from the University of Rochester. Along with her PhD supervisor, Dr. Gerard Mourou, Donna Strickland co-invented Chirped Pulse Amplification. Dr. Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council of Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of technical staff at Princeton University. Dr. Strickland joined the physics department of the University of Waterloo in 1997. At Waterloo, Dr. Strickland's ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations. She is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Premier’s Research Excellence Award, a Cottrell Scholars Award and is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. She served as the 2013 OSA president..

With the help of nonlinear optics, coherent radiation is produced across the electromagnetic spectrum from X-rays to THz frequencies. However the mid-infrared radiation region, from 5 to 20 µm, known to molecular spectroscopists as the "fingerprint region" still has very few coherent sources, especially at the longer wavelengths. Two-color Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) laser systems can deliver two intense pulses needed to generate mid-infrared through the nonlinear process of difference frequency mixing. .