Dancing with the electrons: 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to three particle researchers Lack of aid to Ukraine and McCarthy’s post in danger – this is how the shutdown was averted

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Ferenc Krausz, who conducts research in Germany, Pierre Agostini in the US and France’s Anne L’Huillier for experiments that gave humanity new tools for investigating processes in atoms and molecules. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this on Tuesday in Stockholm.

Ferenc Krausz conducts research as director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching near Munich and at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. Anne L’Huillier works at Lund University (Sweden) and Pierre Agostini at Ohio State University.

The three researchers have shown a way to generate extremely short light pulses that can be used to measure the fast processes in which electrons move or change energy, the Nobel committee said. The contributions of the prize winners have made it possible to study processes that occur so quickly that they could not be followed before.

Fast-moving events flow into each other in people’s perception – just as a film consisting of still images is perceived as continuous movement, the statement said. “If we really want to study short events, we need special technology.” In the world of electrons, changes take place in a few tenths of attoseconds, the committee said. “An attosecond is so short that there are as many seconds in one second as there have been seconds since the universe was created.” The prize winners’ experiments produced light pulses so short that they are measured in attoseconds. They are said to have shown that these pulses can be used to image processes in atoms and molecules.

This year’s top prize for physicists is worth a total of eleven million crowns (about 920,000 francs).

Since the prize was first awarded in 1901, 4 female researchers and 217 researchers have received the Nobel Prize in Physics – one of them, the American John Bardeen, twice.

On Monday, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Hungarian-born biochemist Katalin Karikó and American immunologist Drew Weissman. They had done fundamental work on the development of mRNA vaccines against Corona, as stated in the statement from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Last year, three quantum researchers received the physics prize. According to the academy, the Austrian Anton Zeilinger, the Frenchman Alain Aspect and the American John Clauser have laid the foundation for a new era of quantum technology with their experiments, the academy said. They are said to have conducted groundbreaking experiments with entangled quantum states, in which two particles behave as a unit – even when separated and far apart.

The winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be announced on Wednesday. The announcements for the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize will follow on Thursday and Friday. The series ends next Monday with the Nobel Prize in Economics, sponsored by the Swedish Reichsbank.

The ceremonial presentation of the prizes traditionally takes place on December 10, the anniversary of the death of prize founder Alfred Nobel.

(rbu/sda/dpa)