Glimpses of the ultrafast world of electrons are changing scientists’ vision of the inner workings of atoms and molecules. The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics goes to three physicists who illuminated this realm with ultrashort pulses of light, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced October 3.
Physicists Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier will split the 11 million Swedish kronor (about $1 million) prize, awarded “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter.”
Within atoms and molecules, electrons zip around at extreme speeds. Capturing their to-and-fro is possible only with pulses of light that are extremely short. It’s akin to a camera flash that lasts mere attoseconds, or billionths of a billionth of a second.
Humans have long strived to measure processes with increasing precision, says Peter Armitage, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University. “With the advent of lasers, the timescales that you could measure became shorter and shorter [because] you’re doing it with ultrafast light pulses.”
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