The 2023 Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L鈥橦uillier for their work on generating ultra-short pulses of light to study how electrons move through matter.
Anne L鈥橦uillier at Lund University in Sweden, who is only the fifth woman to have won the physics Nobel, heard the news when she was midway through teaching her students. 鈥淭he last half hour of my lecture was a bit difficult to do,鈥� L鈥橦uillier told a press conference on 3 October.
The study of electrons and their properties on 鈥�attosecond鈥� timescales 鈥� around a billionth of a billionth of a second 鈥� has led to the advent of ultra-fast electronics; has let us distinguish molecules from each other, which is useful for disease detection; and enabled the fine-control of electrons inside matter.
Advertisement
Just as we use light to observe the macroscopic world around us, so, too, can it be used to probe the subatomic world. But because particles such as electrons can move faster than the duration of a pulse of light, many subtle details of their movement can be lost.
That is why attosecond light pulses have proved so vital. The first key breakthrough in producing them came in 1987, when L鈥橦uillier and her colleagues discovered that an infrared laser shone through neon, argon or xenon gas produced light that contained unusually short bursts of constant intensity. L鈥橦uillier and her team described this effect mathematically, which set the stage for for later researchers to refine this strange light and use it to reliably produce these attosecond light pulses.
In 2001, Pierre Agostini at The Ohio State University and Ferenc Krausz at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany both independently developed separate techniques, based on L鈥橦uillier and her team鈥檚 work, to more finely influence the attosecond pulses and to control how long they lasted. Agostini developed a way to generate a string of pulses, of around 250 attoseconds each, known as the RABBIT technique, while Krausz came up with a similar approach called the streaking method, which produced pulses of around 650 attoseconds.
These methods were then frequently used to study a wide range of different electron dynamics, such as how they move together over tiny distances and how their quantum properties change depending on the material they are in.
Studying and understanding electrons on such short timescales has led to advances in ultra-fast electronics, which could one day lead to the development of more powerful computer chips. It has also let us distinguish molecules from each other based on their electron properties, which could be used for fast and accurate diagnostic techniques, such as blood marker tracking.
鈥淥nce you are in the situation where you both understand and you have the technology to master these techniques, then you can think about the applications,鈥� Mats Larsson, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, told the press conference.
