Pierre Agostini

Education and career

Pierre Agostini was born in Tunis, in the French protectorate of Tunisia, in 1941. He obtained his baccalauréat at the Prytanée national militaire school in 1959 in La Flèche, France.

Agostini studied physics at Aix-Marseille University, where he subsequently received a B.Ed. degree (licence d'enseignement) in physics in 1961, and an M.A.S. degree (diplôme d'études approfondies) in 1962. In 1968 he completed a doctoral degree there, on multilayer dielectric filters for the ultraviolet, titled Appareillage permettant la réalisation de filtres multidiélectriques UV : Étude des couches Sb₂O₃.

After his doctorate, he became a researcher at CEA Saclay in 1969 and stayed there until 2002. During this time, Agostini worked in the lab of Gérard Mainfray and Claude Manus, where he researched on multiphoton ionization using the powerful lasers there. They are the first to observe above-threshold ionization in 1979 in xenon gas.

In 2001, Agostini and his team at CEA Saclay along with Harm Geert Muller at the Dutch Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM), using an advanced laser at the Laboratoire d'Optique Appliquée, managed to create a train of pulses each 250 attoseconds in duration. By recombining the ultrashort ultraviolet pulses with the original infrared light they created an interference effect that allowed him to characterize the length and repetition rate of the pulses.

Agostini was a visiting scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the U.S. state of New York between 2002 and 2004, where he worked in Louis F. DiMauro's group. He became professor of physics at the Ohio State University (OSU) in 2005 and ran a laboratory jointly with Louis F. DiMauro who moved a year earlier to OSU. Agostini became emeritus professor at OSU in 2018.