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Eleven laureates were awarded a Nobel Prize in 2023, for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. Their work and discoveries range from effective mRNA vaccines and attosecond physics to fighting against the oppression of women.
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 - NobelPrize.org
Eleven laureates were awarded a Nobel Prize in 2023, for...
- The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 - Popular science background ...
Eleven laureates were awarded a Nobel Prize in 2023, for...
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 - NobelPrize.org
- Overview
- Attosecond science
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This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three physicists — Pierre Agostini at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ferenc Krausz at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and Anne L’Huillier at Lund University, Sweden — for their research into attosecond pulses of light.
Attosecond physics allows scientists to look at the very smallest particles at the very shortest timescales (an attosecond is one-quintillionth of a second, or one-billionth of a nanosecond). The winners developed methods that produce these ultrafast laser pulses, which can be used to study our world at the smallest scales and have applications in chemistry, biology and physics.
The prize was announced this morning by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. The winners share a prize of 11 million Swedish kroner (US$1 million).
The laureates include the fifth woman ever to have been awarded the physics prize (see ‘Nobel imbalance’). Of 221 previous winners, just four have been women: Marie Curie in 1903 for her work on radiation phenomena, Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963 for unpicking some of the details of atomic structure, Donna Strickland in 2018 for work in laser physics and Andrea Ghez in 2020 for research into supermassive black holes.
L’Huillier was teaching when she received the call telling her that she had won. “The last half hour of my lecture was very difficult to do,” she said at a press conference after the prize announcement. “As you know, there are not many women that get this prize, so it’s very, very special.”
An object that moves too fast to be photographed produces the image of a band of light when its picture is taken. But using an extremely fast strobe light to illuminate the object can make it look like it has been frozen in time. Attosecond light pulses work by the same principle, opening up a world of phenomena once thought to be impossible to see.
Physicists who unravelled mysteries of black holes win Nobel prize
Oct 3, 2023 · The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, announced on Monday, was awarded to a pair of scientists who developed the technology that led to the mRNA Covid vaccines.
Oct 3, 2023 · The Nobel Physics Prize was awarded on Tuesday to three scientists for their work on attoseconds, which are almost unimaginably short periods of time. Their work using lasers gives scientists a...
Oct 10, 2023 · The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics recognized three researchers for their work with attosecond light pulses, revolutionizing the study of rapid electron movements and broadening understanding in various fields of physics and chemistry.
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