Image Credit: Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach
The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2023 has been awarded to ‘Attophysics’ Scientists – Pierre Agostini at Ohio State University, US, Ferenc Krausz at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and Anne L’Huillier at Lund University, Sweden for “experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter,” announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. They will be awarded a prize money of 11 million Swedish krona, which is around 1 million US Dollars.
Earlier, Hungarian scientist Katalin Kariko and U.S. colleague Drew Weissman were announced the Nobel Prize of medicine, awarded for their discoveries in mRNA molecules that paved the way for COVID-19 vaccines. The awards for chemistry, literature, peace and economics will be announced soon as well.
Last year, Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics for work on quantum entanglement – the spooky phenomenon where two particles stay linked regardless of the space between them.
Fifth Woman to be Awarded the Prize
A woman being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics should not be as rare sounding in 2023 as it unfortunately is. Anne L’Huiller is the fifth woman to receive a Nobel Prize. Of 221 previous winners, just four have been women: Marie Curie in 1903 for her work on radiation phenomena, Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963 for unpicking some of the details of atomic structure, Donna Strickland in 2018 for work in laser physics and Andrea Ghez in 2020 for research into supermassive black holes.
L’Huillier was actually teaching a class when she received the call from the awarding authority about her winning the prize. “The last half hour of my lecture was very difficult to do,” she said at a press conference after the prize was announced. “As you know, there are not many women that get this prize, so it’s very, very special.”
Attophysics – Meaning and Importance
The motion of electrons has been difficult to observe experimentally until recently, as the simple act of observation would alter the behavior of these particles, hiding their true nature from us. Werner Heisenberg, credited to have been one of the pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics, had said in 1925 that the world of these quantum particles would not be possible to observe. Thanks to attophysics though, this concept might as well be changing.
Attophysics allows scientists to look at the very smallest particles at extremely brief timescales – an attosecond(hence the name attophysics) is one-quintillionth of a second, or one-billionth of a nanosecond. Such timescales are small beyond human abilities of comprehension. A laser that can fire pulses of light for such small periods of time could be used to probe the world of the particles that make up our atoms, to study their behavior and movement to degrees that we have not been able to before.
The awardees have all developed attophysics experiments to be able to produce ultrafast laser pulses, which can be used to probe these extremely small scales. These can have serious positive implications across chemistry, biology and physics.
