Profile of Margaret M. Murnane
- Tinsley H. Davis, Freelance Science Writer
Plucking an electron from a molecule and smashing it back into the same molecule is a highly sensitive way to probe the intricacies of molecular dynamics. This process for investigating how atoms move within a molecule, known as high harmonic generation, is initiated and controlled by lasers. In her lifelong study and use of lasers, Margaret M. Murnane, Fellow of JILA (formerly the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) and faculty member in the Departments of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Colorado (Boulder, CO), has moved farther and farther away from the visible region of the light spectrum. Murnane pioneered the development of femtosecond lasers to generate laser-like beams that span from the ultraviolet to the soft x-ray regions of the spectrum. In her Inaugural Article in this issue of PNAS (1), Murnane and her colleagues describe how x-rays generated by a molecule can be used to probe the internal motion within the same molecule. This method shows promise as a way for imaging molecules undergoing ultrafast structural transformations, including the fundamental chemical action: the making and breaking of chemical bonds.
Archimedes and Rural Ireland
Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, Murnane was born in 1959 in a rural part of County Limerick, Ireland. Her father, an elementary school teacher, never had the opportunity to attend college, but Murnane remembers vividly how he loved science. He had wanted to be a botanist and attempted to teach his young daughter the Latin names of plants. “I can’t remember any of them because I was busy scouring the books he would bring home from the library on astronomy and mathematics,” Murnane says. “My father did create a physicist even though that was not his intent. If I solved a math puzzle, then the reward was chocolate or a new …
