Nobel Prize in Physics for studies into electron movements
October 3, 2023
Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing tools to explore the world of electrons inside atoms, during the tiniest of split seconds.
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Secretary General Hans Ellegren said the scientists' work had yielded "experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter."
Scientists believe that, in addition to helping us understand what happens in the extremely short time frame, this research can be used to make electronics much faster and lasers more efficient, as well as improve the diagnosis of diseases.
Researching very, very short moments in time
An attosecond is a measure of time so short it’s hard to wrap your head around — one quintillionth of a second.
In other words: pretty darn short.
One attosecond is to a second as one second is to the age of the universe; one second is about the duration of a heart beat. This is how the committee did their best to explain it during the Nobel Prize announcements on Tuesday.
In their experiments, the three Nobel laureates managed to produce light pulses that only last attoseconds. These pulses can be used to provide images of what goes on inside atoms and molecules.
"This [research] has opened up a world that was previously inaccessible to us," Jörg Schreiber, professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU), who works with Krausz at the LMU Center for Advanced Laser Applications, told DW. "It’s about time this area of research is recognized."
3 separate paths to success
The 2023 Nobel laureates in physics did their research separately, L'Huillier in the 1980s and Agostini and Krausz in the early 2000s.
"Sorry, I am not very good at speaking but that is because I am very touched at the moment," said L'Huiller, speaking to the committee remotely after the award was announced.
She said that the "holy grail," or the ultimate goal of her field, would be to alter the initial reaction time of chemical reactions. This can be achieved by understanding how an electron behaves in the first few attoseconds after a reaction begins.
Krausz said that when he got the news of the award, he was "not sure whether I’m dreaming or whether it’s reality." In an interview with the Nobel Foundation's website, he stressed that the success of his research would not have been possible without his, "friends, coworkers, colleagues, collaborators."
Krausz was supposed to lead public tours around his lab for an "open day" on October 3 — in view of Germany's national holiday, during which many institutions that are normally closed open their doors to interested visitors.
He wasn’t sure, though, how smoothly it was going to go, being that tour participants would know they were shown around by a newly-minted Nobel Prize winner. "It remains to be seen whether this is going to work out."
One of 5 female laureates
Today, Agostini is a professor at Ohio State University in the US, Krausz is the director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany and L'Huillier is a professor at Lund University in Sweden.
L'Huillier is only the fifth woman to receive the award. The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded 117 times since 1901, to 224 individuals, including the 2023 winners.
The number of female Nobel laureates in the natural sciences is so low as, for a long time, women weren't allowed to study medicine, physics or chemistry. This had begun to change by the time the Nobel prizes were established. But many still saw women as unfit for research, and their contribution to science received a lesser share of recognition than that of their male colleagues — a problem that many female scientists still encounter today.
Using science to help refugees in Ukraine
Astrophysicist Nils Haag, an expert in attosecond physics and Krausz' personal assistant at the Max Planck Institute, said he was "particularly pleased" that Krausz received the award, not just because of his scientific achievements, but also because of the way Krausz assumes social responsibility.
"Only a few weeks after the attack on Ukraine began in the spring of 2022, he took his car and drove to western Ukraine to personally find out on the spot how he could help," Haag wrote in an email to DW. "He seemed to find it unbearable to see such suffering and do nothing."
Shortly thereafter, Haag wrote, Krausz founded the nonprofit aid association science4people, which is in close contact with helpers in Ukraine. The organization provided emergency generators for refugees in Ukraine to bridge the regular power outages, and helped outfit a school with technical equipment, "so that the children could receive lessons despite the extremely adverse conditions."
In 2022, three scientists jointly won the physics prize for proving a once-doubted phenomenon: that tiny particles could retain a connection with each other even when separated.
Nobel Prize announcements are set to continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and the literature prize on Thursday. Friday will see the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize. The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics will be announced on Monday, October 9, 2023.
Anna Carthaus contributed reporting.
Edited by: Sushmitha Ramakrishnan