KMLabs (Boulder, CO) founders Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn are the winners of this year's Benjamin Franklin Medal in physics. They are being honored for their advances in ultrafast tabletop x-ray sources and making these sources "accessible to a new generation of researchers and applications in fields ranging from electronics to medicine." Margaret and Henry are professors of physics at JILA at the University of Colorado.
Since 1824, The Franklin Institute of Philadelphia has honored the legacy of Benjamin Franklin by presenting awards for outstanding achievements in science, engineering, and industry. Past laureates include Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Claude Shannon, Jane Goodall, Nikola Tesla, Stephen Hawking, Edward Lorenz, the Wright Brothers, Bill Gates, and Albert Einstein.
KMLabs provides end-to-end research systems that leverage ultrafast pulses of extreme UV and soft X-ray light for a variety of experiments. The QM Quantum Microscope builds on the company’s technology in high harmonic generation to enable a range of techniques including coherent diffraction imaging, photoemission, pump-probe spectroscopy, and EUV metrology. In addition, KMLabs continues to pioneer the development and engineering of standalone short wavelength sources including the Y-Fi VUV laboratory-based vacuum ultraviolet femtosecond laser source, and the Pantheon platform--a pulsed EUV source-beamline to generate and deliver EUV photons to user-supplied experimental stations.
