Trio win physics Nobel for tiny light pulses to capture changes in atoms

Stockholm, October 3

Scientists Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating ultra-short pulses of light that can give a snapshot of changes within atoms, potentially leading to better detection of disease.

The prize-awarding academy said their studies had given humanity new tools for exploring the movement of electrons inside atoms and molecules, where changes occur in a few tenths of an attosecond — a unit so short that there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe.

The prize, which was raised this year to 11 million Swedish crowns (about $1 million), is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. “The ability to generate attosecond pulses of light has opened the door on a tiny, extremely tiny, time scale and it’s also opened the door to the world of electrons,” said Eva Olsson, member of the Nobel Prize in Physics Selection Committee.

It was once thought such changes in electrons could not be seen, but the use of attosecond pulses has changed this, she added. There are potential applications of the findings in many different areas. In electronics, it is important to understand and control how electrons behave in a material. The field also held promise in areas such as a new in-vitro diagnostic technique to detect characteristic molecular traces of diseases in blood samples, the academy said.

Only the fifth woman to win a Nobel physics prize, L’Huillier works at Lund University in Sweden and Agostini is a professor at Ohio State University in the United States. Hungarian-born Krausz, speaking at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics where he is director, said he was trying to take in the reality of winning the award. — Reuters

INSIDE THE ATOM

• Anne L’Huillier discovered a new effect from the interaction of laser light with atoms in a gas in experiments beginning in the 1980s
• Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz then demonstrated how this could be used to create shorter light pulses than previously possible