This Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier for developing experimental methods that generate attosecond light pulses to study matter.. An attosecond is approximately the time it takes for light to pass through an atom (equivalent to one trillionth of a second) and is the natural scale of electronic motion in matter.. But it was a scale that until recently was inaccessible for experimental studies due to the lack of light pulses with a short enough duration..
As the jury detailed this morning in Stockholm, the work of these three scientists “has provided humanity with new tools to explore the world of electrons within atoms and molecules.”. “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.”.
And what does this mean? Attosecond physics or attophysics, as it is also called, has made it possible to see subatomic phenomena on the shortest time scale captured by humans, for example, direct observations of natural phenomena that previously could not be perceived by people..
“It is incredible, there are not many women who have achieved this award and it is something very special,” declared the French scientist Anne L'Huillier excitedly during her speech at the event in which the award was announced..
Anne L'Huillier (1958, Paris), researcher at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and professor at Lund University in Sweden, has today become the fifth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in the history of these awards. , since 1901. Previously, Marie Curie herself (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), Donna Strickland (2018) and Andrea Ghez (2020) were awarded.
Anne L'Huillier AP
Pierre Agostini, also French (1968), from Aix-Marseille University, is a professor at Ohio State University, in the USA, while the Hungarian Ferenc Krausz directs the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics. Both Anne L' Huillier and Ferenc Krausz received this year the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge award, shared with Paul Corkum.
To understand how the phenomena that occur in nature work at speeds as fast as those that occur in the world of electrons, the Nobel Jury compares the process with a movie: what we perceive as continuous movement is actually a set of still images. In the world of physics, specially developed technology is also needed so that these subatomic processes can be perceived by people..
Between 1987 and 2011, the three awardees successfully carried out discoveries about light transmission and experiments that have produced pulses of light so short that they have been measured in attoseconds, demonstrating that such short pulses can be used to observe the processes that take place inside atoms and molecules. Thus, in 2001 Pierre Agostini produced a consecutive series of light pulses, each of which lasted only 250 attoseconds, while Ferenc Krausz was able to isolate a single light pulse that lasted 650 attoseconds in a different experiment that took place more or less at the same time.
“Now we can open the door to the world of electrons. Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand the mechanisms that are governed by electrons. The next step will be to use them,” said Eva Olsson, head of the Nobel Physics Committee..
Future applications
Among the possible applications of attosecond experiments are electronics (since it is important to understand and control how electrons behave in a material), the search for new clean sources of energy or medicine, since attosecond pulses can be used to identify different molecules, as is done in medical diagnoses. But as is usual in science, the practical applications of advances in the world of physics are often unpredictable and cannot be anticipated at the time basic research is carried out..
Donna Strickland, Nobel Prize in Physics 2020, last Friday in Madrid
Precisely the Canadian Donna Strickland, who last week collected the CSIC Gold Medal in Madrid, addressed the implications of this type of research during her visit to Spain. In statements to EL MUNDO during an event organized by the Canadian Embassy last Friday, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for her pioneering research in the field of optics and lasers defended the importance of basic research and recalled how at the beginning of her career “I couldn't imagine the number of applications lasers would have, and today they are everywhere”.
The secretary of the Swedish Academy (c) Hans Ellegren, during the announcement AP
In the coming years, applications of attoseconds will also emerge. As Luis Roso, professor of Applied Physics in the area of Optics at the University of Salamanca, recalls in statements to the Science Media Center Spain (SMC), in Europe there are already two large facilities dedicated to them, “one is ELI-ALPS in Szeged ( Hungary), based on the techniques developed by these three pioneers. The other is the Eu-XFEL in Hamburg (Germany), where they have developed an alternative technique based on electrons accelerated to enormous energy.”.
If in 2023 the winners research in the field of photonics, last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to the field of quantum mechanics and was also shared by three researchers: the French Alain Aspect, the American John F. Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger.
On Monday, the award was announced in the Medicine category, which went to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their research that allowed them to develop the bases to design mRNA vaccines during the coronavirus pandemic.. The Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines are based on this technology.. Tomorrow, Wednesday, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded and on Thursday, the Nobel Prize in Literature.