Margaret Mary Murnane (born 1959) is an Irish physicist. She is a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder since 1999. Her interests are Atomic & Molecular Physics, Nanoscience, and Optical Physics. Her work with lasers has earned her multiple awards[1][2][3] including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship award in 2000.
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Born and raised in County Limerick, Ireland, Murnane became interested in physics through her father who was an elementary school teacher. She received her B.A. and B.S. from University College, Cork.[3] She moved to the United States to study at the University of California at Berkeley where she earned her Ph.D in 1989. She is married to Prof. Henry Kapteyn, an physicist in his own right. They work together and operate their own lab in Duane Laboratories at the University of Colorado.[4]
Murnane has written or co-written approximately 130 publications in peer reviewed journals, with an average of 42 citations per paper. She built a laser that flashed for ten quadrillionths of a second - the fastest that any human being has ever created. In their lab, Murnane, Kapteyn, and their students make lasers whose beams flash like a strobe light - except that each flash is a trillion times faster. These lasers, like camera flashes, shine a light that lets them record the motions of atoms in chemical reactions. Her newest laser flashes for less than ten femtoseconds.