Lou Barreau

Lou Barreau is a Lecturer at Université Paris-Saclay and a researcher at the Institute of Molecular Sciences, Orsay (ISMO), which is affiliated with both Université Paris-Saclay and CNRS. She works as part of the Dynamics and interactions: radiation, atoms, molecules (DIRAM) team, conducting research on electron dynamics in molecules using ultrafast laser techniques.

Lou Barreau completed her academic training at ENS Cachan (now ENS Paris-Saclay), where she developed an interest in light-matter interaction during her undergraduate-master course. She pursued a PhD from 2014 to 2017 at the Interactions, Dynamics and Lasers Laboratory (LIDYL), focusing on extremely short time scales. Following her PhD, she conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to the Saclay plateau in late 2020.

Dr. Barreau specializes in ultrafast laser spectroscopy, particularly using femtosecond and attosecond laser pulses to study molecular dynamics. Her research focuses on observing light-matter interactions on extremely short time scales, allowing her to "film" molecular processes as they happen. She combines nonlinear optical methods, femtosecond lasers, and charged particle detection to study a wide variety of processes at the molecular level, with particular emphasis on photoionization dynamics and electron behavior in gas phase molecules.

• Recipient of the Louis Armand prize from the French Academy of Sciences (end of 2021)

As a lecturer since November 2020, Dr. Barreau divides her time between research in spectroscopy and teaching chemistry at the undergraduate-master level. She passed the 'agrégation' teaching qualification while at ENS, demonstrating her longstanding commitment to education. She is particularly enthusiastic about mentoring students in the laboratory setting and is currently developing projects to equip her laboratory for advanced research.

Dr. Barreau works within the DIRAM team at ISMO, where she is focused on advancing ultrafast laser technology. Her current laboratory has femtosecond laser capabilities in the visible range, but she is working toward developing attosecond X-ray pulse generation to achieve even greater temporal resolution in her molecular observations.