In October 1985, Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou published in Optics Communications the Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) technique, solving the central obstacle to building ultra-high-power lasers: optical material destruction by energy density. The method temporally stretches the pulse by decomposing its frequencies, amplifies it in Nd:Glass without melting components, and recompresses it just before the target, releasing colossal power in picoseconds. Without CPA, the NIF's 192 beams would have destroyed their own amplifiers. Strickland and Mourou received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics; Strickland was the third woman laureate in Physics in over a century.