Anne L'Huillier
Anne L’Huillier is a French physicist and a professor at Lund University in Sweden. She leads an attosecond physics group that studies how electrons move in real time, helping scientists understand chemical reactions at the atomic level. Her work helped establish the field of attochemistry, and in 2003 her group set a world record for the shortest laser pulse—170 attoseconds.
Born on 16 August 1958 in Paris, L’Huillier earned a double master’s degree in theoretical physics and mathematics before turning to experimental physics for her PhD at Pierre and Marie Curie University. Her doctoral work focused on multiphoton and multielectron ionization in high-intensity laser fields. She did postdoctoral research at the CEA Saclay near Paris, the Chalmers Institute of Technology in Sweden, and the University of Southern California in the United States. She joined CEA Saclay permanently in 1986 and moved to Lund University in the mid-1990s, becoming a professor there in 1997.
Her research centers on high harmonic generation in gases, producing extremely short ultraviolet light pulses lasting tens to hundreds of attoseconds. She helped advance the theoretical understanding of this process and its practical use for observing electron dynamics. In 2017 her Lund group helped resolve a debate about photoemission delays in neon by revealing the contribution of shake-up electrons, bringing experiments into excellent agreement with theory.
L’Huillier has received many honors. She was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2004 and later became a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2018. Among her awards are the UNESCO L’Oréal Award (2011), the Max Born Award (2021), the Wolf Prize in Physics (2022), the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2022), and the Legion of Honour (2022). In 2023 she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Ferenc Krausz and Pierre Agostini for work that generates attosecond light pulses to study electron dynamics.
Personal details: Anne L’Huillier is married to Claes-Göran Wahlström, a fellow professor at Lund University, and they have two children.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 22:12 (CET).