Born and raised in County Limerick, Ireland, Murnane became interested in physics through her father who was a primary school teacher. She received her B.A. and M.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 PhD in 1989 under Roger Falcone.[4] She is married to physics professor Henry Kapteyn. They work together and operate their own lab at JILA at the University of Colorado.[5]
Murnane has co-authored more than 500 articles in peer reviewed journals, with her work receiving around 35000 citations.[6] Dr. Murnane is a founder of the field of ultrafast X-ray science, having made transformational contributions to this area of research in every decade since the 1980s. She is also currently one of the most-accomplished woman laboratory experimental physicists in the U.S., further distinguished by having independently developed her university-based laboratory effort with Prof. Kapteyn.[7]
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, make it possible to record the motions of atoms in chemical reactions, and of atoms and electrons in materials systems. Some of her lasers can generate pulses of less than 10 femtoseconds.[8] The very high peak power of these ultrashort laser pulses makes it possible to coherently upconvert light to much shorter wavelengths, in the extreme ultraviolet and soft X-ray region of the spectrum. This high harmonic generation process makes possible for the first time a tabletop-scale X-ray laser light source.
Prof. Murnane was the first to explore the use of femtosecond lasers for x-ray generation, and has made substantive pioneering contributions to many aspects of this area of research, including the science and fundamental understanding of the high harmonic process, the laser technology required to use this process to implement practical tabletop light sources for applications, and in applying this new source to make fundamental discoveries in areas ranging from basic atomic and chemical dynamics, to materials dynamics, to nanoimaging. She is also a founder the area now known as experimental "Attosecond Science," having performed foundational experiments that for the first time clearly demonstrated the ability to manipulate electron dynamics with attosecond precision.[9]
She is also the co-founder of the laser company KMLabs, Inc.,[10] for which Intel Capital is a co-investor,[11] and which has commercialized these technologies for research and possible industrial applications in nanometrology.
^This can be determined through a survey and literature search for current members of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as recipients of the Franklin Institute Awards.
