In 2004, Malka demonstrated that high energy monoenergetic electron beams could be generated using the technique of laser wakefield acceleration,[1] and subsequently used them to develop compact X-ray and gamma radiation sources with applications in medicine, security technology and phase-contrast imaging.

[2][3][4] For these contributions to the field, he was awarded the IEEE Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Award [de] in 2007,[5] the Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics [de] in 2017,[6] and the Hannes Alfvén Prize in 2019.

[7] Malka came from a Jewish family in Morocco and came to France at the age of six, where he grew up in Marseille and in the Parisian suburbs.

He studied at the Ecole nationale supérieure de chimie in Rennes and received his doctorate at the École Polytechnique with a dissertation in atomic and plasma physics.

From 1990, he then worked at the École Polytechnique for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and from 2004 as Research Director of the Laboratory for Applied Optics (LOA).