NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS

Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating ultra-short pulses of light that can give a snapshot of changes within atoms, potentially leading to better detection of disease.

The prize-awarding academy said their studies had given humanity new tools for exploring the movement of electrons inside atoms and molecules, a phenomenon that was long thought impossible to trace.

Changes in electrons occur in a few tenths of an attosecond – a unit so short that there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe. Hungarian-born Krausz, whose team generated the first ultra-fast pulses in the early 2000s, has likened attosecond physics to a fast-shutter camera where the short light flashes allow a freeze frame look within the microcosm.

There are potential applications of the findings in many different areas. In electronics, it is important to understand and control how electrons behave in a material.

The field also holds promise in areas such as a new in-vitro diagnostic technique to detect characteristic molecular traces of diseases in blood samples