The Citation Titan: How Paul Corkum’s Google Scholar Profile Maps the Frontier of Attosecond Physics

Scroll down his list of publications, and a pattern emerges. Papers from the early 1990s sit alongside those from 2023, all generating hundreds of citations per year. His seminal 1993 Physical Review Letters on the "Plasma perspective on strong field multiphoton ionization" remains a bedrock. But look closer: his 2020s papers on high-harmonic generation and molecular orbital tomography are already climbing the ranks.

For all the metrics, a Google Scholar profile cannot capture the moment in 1993 when Corkum proposed the "recollision model" on a napkin (or a blackboard). The profile lists the output—the Nature papers, the PRLs , the Reviews of Modern Physics —but it cannot quantify the elegance of a single idea: that you can use a laser to pull an electron away from an atom, slam it back, and use the resulting flash to take the fastest movie ever made.