The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2023 Physics Nobel Prize to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter.” These pulses help study the super-fast movements of electrons inside atoms.
- The awarded scientists have successfully produced light pulses so short they’re measured in attoseconds.
- An attosecond is a quintillionth of a second, as brief as one second to the entire age of the Universe.
- These ultrafast pulses act like a high-speed shutter, enabling the study of electron behavior.
- Electrons move incredibly fast, in billionths of a second, and so, appeared as blurs in advanced microscopes before these breakthroughs.
- Eva Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, stated that this opens the door to understanding electron-governed mechanisms.
- Attosecond physics sharpens our focus on crucial processes within atoms and molecules.
- This development may lead to the creation of more precise electron microscopes, faster electronics, and early-stage disease diagnostic tests.
- Prof L’Huillier, based at Lund University, is the fifth woman to win a physics Nobel.
- The three winners employed precision lasers to generate incredibly brief bursts of light. Professor L’Huillier, from Lund University in Sweden, made a remarkable discovery regarding the interaction of laser light with atoms in a gas. Professors Agostini from Ohio State University and Krausz from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany then demonstrated the practical application of this discovery by producing even shorter pulses of light than were previously attainable.
Previous Winners Of The Nobel Prize In Physics
- 2022 – Alain Aspect, American John Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger for research into quantum mechanics – the science that describes nature at the smallest scales;
- 2021 – Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi were given the prize for advancing our understanding of complex systems, such as Earth’s climate;
- 2020 – Sir Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez received the prize for their work on the nature of black holes;
- 2019 – James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz shared the prize for ground-breaking discoveries about the Universe;
- 2018 – Donna Strickland, Arthur Ashkin and Gerard Mourou were awarded the prize for their discoveries in the field of laser physics.