Nobel Prize 2023 in physics: A look at the winners

The trio’s experiments “have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules”

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Ferenc Krausz, Pierre Agostini and Anne L’Huillier for their experiments that “generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electrodynamics in matter”.

Their experiments “have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside 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,” said the Nobel Prize website.

Also read: What is a Nobel Prize? 

Pierre Agostini

Pierre Agostini is a French-American experimental physicist, who studied at Aix-Marseille University in France and obtained his PhD in 1968. He currently teaches at The Ohio State University, Columbus, US. In 2001, Agostini succeeded in producing and investigating a series of consecutive light pulses, in which each pulse lasted just 250 attoseconds. He is known for the invention of the RABBITT (reconstruction of attosecond beating by interference of two-photon transitions) technique to characterise attosecond light pulses.

Anne L’Huillier

Born in Paris in 1958, Anne L’Huillier teaches at Sweden’s Lund University. She is the fifth woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics. “Anne L’Huillier discovered a new effect from laser light’s interaction with atoms in a gas. Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz demonstrated that this effect can be used to create shorter pulses of light than were previously possible,” the Nobel Committee said in a press release. L'Huillier got the call from the academy in the middle of a lecture and when it was done she went right back to teaching. She shared the 2022 Wolf Prize in Physics with professors Paul Corkum at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and Ferenc Krausz at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Germany. In 2003, under her leadership, her group broke the world record with the smallest laser pulse of 170 attoseconds.

Ferenc Krausz

Krausz was born on May 17, 1962, in Mór, Hungary. He is the director at Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Garching and teaches at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. Krausz was preparing for a morning of giving lab tours at his institute when he received a phone call from Sweden. “I'm not sure whether I’m dreaming or whether it’s reality,” he said. It was the research team led by Krausz that generated and measured the first attosecond light pulse.