Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 Awarded for Breakthroughs in Attosecond Physics
Stockholm, Sweden, October 3, 2023 – The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2023. This year, the prestigious prize is being awarded to three exceptional scientists: Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier. They are being recognized for their groundbreaking experiments, which have provided humanity with revolutionary tools to explore the world of electrons within atoms and molecules.
The laureates’ pioneering work has given rise to ultra-short pulses of light, measured in attoseconds (a billionth of a billionth of a second), that can be harnessed to observe and measure the lightning-fast processes in which electrons move and change energy levels.
In the world of electrons, changes occur in a matter of attoseconds, a time scale so fleeting that there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe. The laureates’ experiments have successfully generated these incredibly short pulses of light, demonstrating their potential in capturing images of processes taking place inside atoms and molecules.
Anne L’Huillier’s pivotal discovery in 1987 revealed the emergence of various light overtones when infrared laser light passed through noble gases, shedding light on the interaction between laser light and gas atoms. This discovery laid the foundation for subsequent breakthroughs.
In 2001, Pierre Agostini achieved a significant milestone by producing consecutive light pulses, each lasting only 250 attoseconds. Simultaneously, Ferenc Krausz developed a distinct experiment isolating a single light pulse lasting 650 attoseconds. These breakthroughs enabled the investigation of processes so rapid that they were previously inaccessible to scientific inquiry.
Eva Olsson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, emphasized the far-reaching implications of their work, stating, “We can now open the door to the world of electrons. Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand mechanisms that are governed by electrons. The next step will be utilizing them.”
These groundbreaking discoveries hold immense promise for numerous applications, including electronics, where understanding and controlling electron behavior in materials is crucial, as well as medical diagnostics for identifying different molecules.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 carries a total prize amount of 11 million Swedish kronor, to be shared equally among the laureates: Pierre Agostini, Professor at The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA; Ferenc Krausz, Director at Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany, and Professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany; and Anne L’Huillier, Professor at Lund University, Sweden.
