Three scientists yesterday won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on how electrons move around the atom during the tiniest fractions of seconds, a field that could one day lead to better electronics or disease diagnoses.
The award went to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for their study of the tiny part of each atom that races around the center.
Electrons move so fast that they have been out of reach of efforts to isolate them, but by looking at the tiniest fraction of a second possible — one-quintillionth of a second, known as an attosecond — scientists now have a “blurry” glimpse of them and that opens up whole new sciences, experts said.
Photo: AFP
“The electrons are very fast and the electrons are really the workforce in everywhere,” Nobel Committee member Mats Larsson said. “Once you can control and understand electrons, you have taken a very big step forward.”
Their experiments “have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules,” said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the prize in Stockholm.
The three “have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy,” the academy said.
Photo: AFP
At the moment, the research is about understanding the universe, but the hope is that it will have many practical applications.
L’Huillier, who is only the fifth woman to receive a Nobel in physics, said she was teaching when she got the call that she had won.
She joked that it was difficult to finish the lesson.
Photo: AFP / OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
“This is the most prestigious and I am so happy to get this prize. It’s incredible,” L’Huillier, a professor at Lund University in Sweden, told the news conference announcing the prize. “As you know there are not so many women who got this prize so it’s very special.”
Swedish news agency TT reached Krausz, director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, by telephone in Germany, where it was a holiday.
“My colleagues are enjoying their day off, but I hope that we will meet tomorrow and then we will probably open a bottle of champagne,” he was quoted as saying.
Agostini is affiliated with Ohio State University.
The Nobel Prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (US$989,929). The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896.
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