The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to three atomic physicists who developed a way to study the behavior of electrons during the tiniest split seconds. The award-giving body, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on Tuesday, named France’s Pierre Agostini of Ohio State University in the US and Hungarian-Austrian Ferenc Krausz of Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Lund University in Sweden, as this year’s winners for their “experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in the matter.”
These ultra-short bursts of laser light allow scientists to follow the motions of electrons within atoms and molecules. This breakthrough could lead to new types of advanced electronics or even better disease diagnosis. The physics prize is the first of four to be announced this week, with awards for literature, peace, and economics coming later.
The three physics laureates used precision lasers to create a series of very short light pulses. Each pulse was as long as 250 attoseconds — a quintillionth of a second or about as fast as the blink of an eye. By combining these extremely short light pulses into a longer pulse, they managed to observe how electrons moved at an ultra-fast rate and even capture an image of an individual electron moving inside an atom. This effect is similar to the blur caused by a camera’s shutter when taking photographs of a fast-moving subject but at much higher speeds and in ultra-high definition.
Agostini, Krausz, and L’Huillier have made several important scientific discoveries using this technique. In particular, they discovered that the shorter the pulses are, the more detail is visible in the images. They also showed how different kinds of atoms interact differently with the laser beam and how atomic vibrations can be controlled by controlling the length of laser pulses.
L’Huillier, a professor at Lund University in Sweden, made a significant discovery by discovering that certain overtones of laser light can be used to produce extremely short pulses. She also created a new method for observing how these laser pulses interact with an atom and how their shape and length influence the interaction.
L’Huillier was lecturing when she got the call that she had won the Nobel Prize. She stepped outside to take the call but continued her lecture without telling her students she had won the prize. She said at a press conference that teaching is a “very, very important thing for me” and that she had to keep going because it would have been difficult to finish her lesson after she found out about the news.
The prize, raised this year to 11 million Swedish crowns (about $1 million), is awarded by the Nobel Foundation, founded on the will of Alfred Nobel. It is given in recognition of significant contributions to humanity.
