Pierre Agostini

Ohio State University

Pierre Agostini is a French experimental physicist and emeritus professor at the Ohio State University whose pioneering work in strong-field laser physics provided some of the foundational tools of attosecond science. In 1979 he discovered above-threshold ionization, the surprising observation that an atom in an intense laser field can absorb many more photons than the minimum required to ionize, a result that reshaped the understanding of how matter behaves in strong electromagnetic fields. Two decades later, while at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA Saclay), he invented and demonstrated the RABBITT technique — reconstruction of attosecond beating by interference of two-photon transitions — which made it possible to measure trains of light pulses lasting only hundreds of attoseconds, directly characterizing the fastest pulses of light ever produced at the time. For this achievement he shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics with Anne L'Huillier and Ferenc Krausz. After his long career in France he joined Ohio State University, where his research continued to focus on attosecond metrology and the interaction of intense ultrashort laser pulses with atoms and molecules. His work sits at the heart of the instrumentation ecosystem that supplies high-power femtosecond laser amplifiers, gas-jet harmonic sources, and time-of-flight electron spectrometers, making attosecond laboratories built on his methods active buyers of precision ultrafast optics and vacuum technology.