Murnane has co-authored more than 500 articles in
peer reviewed journals, with her work receiving around 35000
citations. She is a founder of the
field of
ultrafast X-ray science, having made contributions to this area of research in every decade since the 1980s. She has developed her university-based laboratory effort in collaboration with Kapteyn. In their lab, Murnane, Kapteyn, and their students make lasers whose beams flash like a
strobe light – except that each flash is a
trillion times faster. These lasers, like camera flashes, make it possible to record the motions of atoms in
chemical reactions, and of atoms and
electrons in materials systems. Some of her lasers can generate
pulses of less than 10
femtoseconds.The very high peak power of these ultrashort laser pulses makes it possible to coherently
upconvert light to much shorter
wavelengths, in the extreme
ultraviolet and
soft X-ray region of the spectrum. This
high harmonic generation process makes possible a tabletop-scale X-ray laser light source. Murnane explored the use of femtosecond lasers for x-ray generation and has made substantive contributions to many aspects of this area of research, including the understanding of the
high harmonic process, the laser technology required to use this process to implement practical tabletop light sources for applications, and in applying this new source to make fundamental discoveries in areas ranging from basic atomic and chemical dynamics to materials dynamics, to nanoimaging. She is also a founder of the area now known as experimental "
Attosecond Science", having performed experiments that demonstrated the ability to manipulate electron dynamics with
attosecond precision. She is the co-founder of the laser company KMLabs, Inc., for which
Intel Capital is a co-investor. == Honours ==