Nathalie Picqué

Nathalie Picqué is Director at the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy and Professor of Physics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Previously, she was a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany, and, before that, a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Orsay, France. She received her doctoral degree in physics from the University Paris-Saclay, France, in 1998.

Picqué is a pioneer in the development and application of techniques of spectroscopy over broad spectral bandwidths with optical frequency combs. These methods include dual-comb spectroscopy and Fourier-transform spectroscopy with a laser frequency comb. She showed how to interrogate and analyze broadband molecular spectra with thousands or millions of comb lines simultaneously. Dual-comb interferometers without moving parts perform direct frequency measurements over a wide span, with no geometric limitations to resolution. They have created new opportunities for precision spectroscopy and for miniaturized spectrometers on photonic chips. Dual-comb spectroscopy has now spread around the world.

She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2013 Coblentz Award, the 2021 Gentner-Kastler Prize, the 2022 Helmholtz Prize, and the 2022 Falling Walls Science Breakthrough in Physical Sciences. She is a Fellow of Optica and received the society’s 2024 William F. Meggers Award, “For pioneering broadband molecular spectroscopy with interfering frequency combs.”