Three researchers who have established the foundations for studying with lasers how electrons move in matter in times of trillionths of a second were recognized yesterday with the Nobel Prize in Physics.
The prize has been awarded to the French Anne L’Huillier, from the University of Lund (Sweden), who becomes the fifth woman to win the prize since its creation in 1901; to fellow Frenchman Pierre Agostini, from the Ohio State University (USA), and Hungarian Ferenc Krausz, from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and the University of Munich (Germany).
They have been awarded “for experimental methods that generate attosecond light pulses for the study of electron dynamics in matter”, according to the verdict of the jury of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His experiments “have given humanity new tools to explore the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules”, highlighted the academy in the press release announcing the award.
The research of the prize winners has established the foundations of the new field of attophysics, or physics of attoseconds, which investigates phenomena so ephemeral that they could not be studied before. An attosecond, equal to one trillionth of a second (or 10 raised to the power minus 18), is so short that there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe.
Processes that happen on scales of attoseconds “are the fastest that humans can visualize”, emphasizes Lluís Torner, director of the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Castelldefels, where research is carried out in this field. “It is the scale on which chemical reactions begin”.
Looking to the future, the physics of attoseconds will have applications in electronics, where “it is important to understand and control how electrons behave in a material”, highlighted the Swedish academy yesterday.
It can also have applications in the field of medical diagnosis because “attosecond pulses can be used to identify different molecules”. Ferenc Krausz, one of the laureates, has begun to investigate possible biological applications of attosecond physics.
The research teams of Krausz and d’Agostini were the first to demonstrate in 2001 that it was possible to produce pulses of light with a duration of attoseconds.
Anne L’Huillier’s research in previous years had laid the foundations for progress. In the “series of seminal works in the mid-to-late nineties”, as the Swedish Academy of Sciences describes them, the physicist Maciej Lewenstein, from the ICFO photonics institute, played a central role.
Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier had been recognized in recent months with the Wolf award and the Frontiers of Knowledge award from the BBVA Foundation. Both prizes are recognized in the scientific community because some of the winners later receive the Nobel.
However, in both cases, Krausz and L’Huillier had shared the prizes with the Canadian Paul Corkum, of the University of Ottawa, another great pioneer of attosecond physics, who remains as the great forgotten Nobel laureate. ‘this year. The Nobel Foundation has the criterion of awarding prizes to a maximum of three people in each category, so that, since they awarded Pierre Agostini, they had to discard Corkum.
