Nobel Physics Prize 2023: Pierre Agostin, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier honoured for illuminating electrons
- Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier won for experiments that gave humanity new tools to explore the world of electrons in atoms and molecules
- LiHuillier is now just the fifth woman to receive a Nobel in physics
The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded on Tuesday to three scientists who look at electrons in atoms during the tiniest of split seconds.
Pierre Agostini of The Ohio State University in the US; Ferenc Krausz of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany; and Anne L’Huillier of Lund University in Sweden won the award.
The trio were given the honour for their study of the tiny part of each atom that races around the centre and that is fundamental to virtually everything: chemistry, physics, our bodies and our gadgets.
Electrons move around so fast that they have been out of reach of human efforts to isolate them, but by looking at the tiniest fraction of a second possible – one quintillionth of a second known as an attosecond – scientists now have a “blurry” glimpse of them and that opens up whole new sciences, experts said.
“The electrons are very fast and the electrons are really the workforce in everywhere,” Nobel Committee member Mats Larsson said. “Once you can control and understand electrons you have taken a very big step forward.”
Their experiments “have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the prize in Stockholm.
They “have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.”
Fast-moving events flow into each other when perceived by humans, just like a film that consists of still images is perceived as continual movement, the academy said.
“If we want to investigate really brief events, we need special technology. In the world of electrons, changes occur in a few tenths of an attosecond – an attosecond is so short that there are as many in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe.”
At the moment, this science is about understanding our universe rather than practical applications, but the hope is that it will eventually lead to better electronics and disease diagnosis.
“Attosecond science allows us to address fundamental questions such as the timescale of the photoelectric effect for which Einstein, Albert Einstein, received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921,” according to Eva Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
L’Huillier told a news conference, “it is really a prestigious prize and I’m so happy to get it. It’s incredible”.
She told reporters she was teaching when she got the call that she had won. She joked that it was hard to finish the lesson.
“I am so happy to get this prize. It’s incredible,” she said. “As you know there are not so many women who got this prize so it’s very special.”
She is only the fifth woman to receive a Nobel in physics.
Last year, Alain Aspect of France, John Clauser of the United States and Austria’s Anton Zeilinger won the Nobel for their work into quantum entanglement, a concept once dismissed by Albert Einstein as “spooky action”.
The Physics Prize is the second Nobel award announced this week.
On Monday, Hungarian-born researcher Katalin Kariko and US scientist Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on mRNA vaccines against Covid-19.
The Physics Prize will be followed by the Chemistry Prize on Wednesday, with the highly watched Literature and Peace Prizes to be announced on Thursday and Friday respectively.
The Economics Prize closes out the 2023 Nobel season on Monday.
Except for Economics, the prizes were endowed by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel (1833-96), the inventor of dynamite.
The first awards were handed out in 1901.
Each prize is worth 11 million kronor (US$1 million) and will be handed out with a diploma and gold medal on December 10 – the date of Nobel’s death in 1896.
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded almost every year since the first prize in 1901.
US physicist John Bardeen is the only laureate so far who has been awarded the prize twice, in 1956 and 1972.
