Pierre Agostini (French, researcher at Ohio University, USA), Ferenc Krausz (Hungary, working at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany) and Anne L’Huillier (French, scientist at University of Munich from Lund, Sweden) are the winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced yesterday. The jury explained that they were rewarded for creating “extremely short light pulses that can be used to measure fast processes during which electrons move or change energy”. The progress the three made “made it possible to investigate processes so quickly that were previously impossible to follow,” the explanation of vote also states.
Physicists have managed to create light pulses on the order of attoseconds. “An attosecond is so short that there are as many seconds in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe,” says the Royal Swedish Academy. According to the jury, the experiments of these three scientists “have given humanity new tools to explore the world of electrons in atoms and molecules.”
Anne L’Huillier, a lecturer at Lund University in Sweden, has become the fifth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics since 1901, a fact highlighted by her in her response to the press. scientist said he received the jury’s call while giving a lecture: “I’m very excited, not many women have won the award so it’s very, very special,” she said. Anne L’Huillier thus joins a limited group consisting of Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), Donna Strickland (2018) and Andrea Ghez (2020), the former winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
L’Huillier, born 65 years ago in Paris, discovered in 1987 that different colors of light were created when infrared laser light was emitted by a noble gas, a phenomenon related to the interaction of the laser with the atoms of the gas. She developed this process, opening the door to further advances and applications in the semiconductor industry and imaging techniques.
In 2001, Pierre Agostini managed to produce a series of consecutive light pulses that lasted only 250 attoseconds. At the same time, Ferenc Krausz, born 61 years ago in the Hungarian city of Mór and current director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (in Garching, Germany), achieved a light pulse of 650 attoseconds.
“Millionth of the millionth of the millionth part”
Speaking to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, physicist and chemist Fernando Martín, professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, former collaborator of Anne L’Huillier, explained that “an attosecond is the millionth of the millionth of the millionth part of a second. It is 0.000000000000000001 seconds.” “If the Earth takes a year to revolve around the sun, an electron takes 150 attoseconds to go around the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. If we want to take a picture of the electron’s motion, we need an exposure time of attoseconds, otherwise it will be blurry. With these lasers you can take these pictures and see the movement of the electrons in real time,” added Martín, also scientific director of the IMDEA Nanoscience Institute.
Marta Fajardo, professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), explained to the Lusa agency that the attosecond time fraction is so short that electronic transitions can be studied, as if it were a slow camera. “This work allows us to identify light phenomena on a very small time scale and already has practical application in current research,” he said, adding that the study of these light flashes will enable future applications in various technologies, such as computing, because “it opens the doors to all processes that are faster than what we could see before.”
Last year, three scientists also won the Nobel Prize in Physics: the Frenchman Alain Aspect, the North American John Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger, pioneers of the revolutionary mechanisms of quantum physics, for proving that small particles could maintain an interconnection . when separated. His work has been questioned, but is now being investigated for possible applications in everyday life, such as information encryption.
The Nobel Prizes have a monetary value of 11 million Swedish crowns (approximately 950 thousand euros). The money comes from an inheritance from the prize’s creator, the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. The awards will be presented by King Carlos Gustavo of Sweden at a ceremony to take place in Stockholm on December 10. , the date of his death by Alfred Nobel.
With agencies
Source: DN
