A Canadian physicist has received one of science's highest honours.
Donna Strickland, a professor at the University of Waterloo, is one of three winners of this year's Nobel Prize for Physics and collected the award with a big smile in Sweden today.
The Nobel committee says Strickland and French scientist Gerard Mourou will each receive a quarter of the US$1.01 million prize for their joint work on laser physics.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics goes to... Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland! Watch the laureates collect their #NobelPrize medal and diploma. pic.twitter.com/w24OkEjROl
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) December 10, 2018
Strickland's win makes her only the third woman to win the Physics prize, and the first Canadian female scientist to do so.
Her prize-winning work was conducted in the early 1980s while she was completing her PhD under Mourou's supervision.
She and Mourou discovered Chirped Pulse Amplification, a technique that underpins today's short-pulse, high-intensity lasers, which have become a key part of corrective eye surgeries.