It was the quickest Nobel Prize ever! On Tuesday October 3, the Swedish Academy celebrated the "attosecond" – a very, very short time – by awarding the Nobel Prize for Physics to French-Swedish Anne L'Huillier, Frenchman Pierre Agostini and Austro-Hungarian Ferenc Krausz. Attosecond? The blink of an eye might be fleeting, but it is still 1,000,000,000,000,000 times longer than a hundred attoseconds. In one attosecond, light travels three angstroms, the typical size of an atom.
One attosecond is equal to exactly 10-18 seconds. It is 1,000 times shorter than another unit that was previously rewarded by the Nobel jury, in 1999, but in chemistry section: the femtosecond.
This year's Nobel Prize in Physics does not celebrate a new word, of course, but the pioneers who brought it to life in the form of ultraviolet flashes of light lasting a few hundred attoseconds. It took more than 10 years of work and effort for the winners to reach this point.
L'Huillier, 65, a professor at Lund University in Sweden, became the fifth French physicist to win this award, the 16th Nobel medal for France. And Agostini, born in 1941, former researcher at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and now at Ohio State University, won the 17th. The French pair shared the prize equally with Krausz, 61, professor at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, near Munich (Germany).
Missing from the list was Canadian Paul Corkum, soon to be 80, of the University of Ottawa, who was awarded the Wolf Prize in 2022, along with L'Huillier and Krausz. This prize is often considered to be a placeholder for the Nobel Prize. The three physicists' names were circulating so intensely that last year, the University of Ottawa anticipated the Nobel jury's announcement by prematurely posting a winning press release, which remained online for more than a few attoseconds.
These scientists have each contributed to equipping chemists and physicists with ultra-fast cameras to film processes that are otherwise invisible because they are far too brief to be captured. Using lasers with pulses lasting just a few femtoseconds, chemists were able to see chemical bonds being broken for the first time. As in the stroboscopic effect, where scenes appear to freeze under the effect of the succession of flashes. Here, the scenes are not nightclub dancers, but equally stirring objects, on infinitely smaller scales: the electrons at the heart of molecules, which are responsible for chemical bonds.
Attoseconds reveal an even more profound and agitated world. We see electrons tearing themselves away from a nucleus, jumping from one atom to another, taking on bizarre shapes in space, or moving from one internal energy state to another, like climbers on a ladder.
You have 64.51% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.