Three scientists who experimentally probed the blurry realm of the electron have been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in physics. Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier were honoured for experiments that, according to the Nobel Committee, "have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules". The prize was announced Tuesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The scientists, hailing from the United States, Germany, and Sweden, used extraordinarily short pulses of light to track the way electrons move in atoms and create the chemical bonds that are necessary for the formation of molecules.
"The reason we care about the electron is all chemistry … is all about how electrons interact," American Physical Society president Robert Rosner said after the prize announcement. "All atoms are a nucleus surrounded by clouds of electrons, and it's these clouds of electrons that interact with each other that allow you to make molecules, to assemble stuff."
Agostini is a professor emeritus at Ohio State University. Krausz has positions at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. L'Huillier is a professor at Lund University in Sweden.
L'Huillier is the fifth woman ever honoured with a Nobel in physics. She was teaching at Lund University when her phone rang several times Tuesday, and she finally answered the call from the academy.
"The last half hour of my lecture was difficult to do," she said by phone during the Nobel news conference. "I am very touched at the moment. As you know, there are not so many women who get this prize, so it's very, very special."
Electrons are workhorses in the physical processes of the world as we know it, but they are small and elusive entities with the head-scratching quality of appearing to act both like a particle and a wave.
At this incredibly tiny scale, the physical world has been difficult to describe except with approximations, but the three laureates found ways to track elections with new technologies.
The work honoured on Tuesday comes from a discipline known as attosecond physics, so called because the pulses of light used in the experiments last only an attosecond, a period so brief that scientists say there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds since the dawn of time roughly 13.8 billion years ago.
"At this time scale, time stands still for everything except the electrons," said Olle Eriksson, a physicist at Uppsala University in Sweden. Attosecond physics holds the potential for scientists to better understand how electrons move through different materials, like electrical conductors, and to help them better identify molecules in medical diagnostics.
It is hard to predict who or what will receive the Nobel Prize in physics because there is such a wide range of disciplines in the field, including the study of subatomic particles, research on material properties, and the scrutiny of galaxies at the edge of the visible universe. The Academy often honours work performed many decades earlier.
The Nobel rules are simultaneously restrictive in two ways: only people who are still living can be awarded the prize, and no more than three people can receive the prize for any particular achievement.
Last year, the Nobel went to three researchers for breakthroughs in quantum information science, a field that promises someday to revolutionise computing and the transfer of information via "quantum teleportation". The 2021 prize honoured research relevant to climate change, while the 2020 prize centred on discoveries about black holes.
The Washington Post