Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to three scientists for work on electrons
Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier will share the prize.
The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics was on Tuesday awarded to scientists Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for their work on electrons.
The jury said that the Nobel prize was given to the three for “experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”.
Agostini is a professor at the Ohio State University in the United States. Krausz is the director of Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany and L’Huillier is a professor at Sweden’s Lund University.
The jury said that their experiments have “given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules”.
They added, “Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier 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.”
Tuesday’s award winners were selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and will together receive about Rs 8.2 crore.
This is the second Nobel Prize to be awarded this year. On Monday, the prize in physiology or medicine was awarded to scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their research that led directly to the first mRNA vaccines to fight Covid-19.
The other awards given in categories of chemistry, literature, peace and economics will be announced between October 4 and October 9. The prizes will be handed out to the winners on December 10.
In 2022, the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to scientists Alain Aspect, John F Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for their experiments with entangled photons.