On Tuesday, October 3, the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 was awarded jointly to French researcher Pierre Agostini, French-Swedish atomic physics professor Anne L'Huillier and Austrian-Hungarian physicist Ferenc Krausz.
They were rewarded for their work on attosecond physics, which enables the creation of "really short laser pulses that allow you to follow the super-fast movement of electrons inside molecules," explained Lars Brostrom, science specialist with Swedish public broadcaster SR. The attosecond is currently the smallest measurable unit of time (one billionth of a billionth of a second).
L'Huillier had already won the prestigious Wolf Prize in 2022, sometimes a precursor to the Nobel Prize, along with Krausz and Canadian physicist Paul Corkum.
Before L'Huillier, only four women had won the Nobel Prize in Physics since it was first given out in 1901: Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), Donna Strickland (2018) and Andrea Ghez (2020).
Prior to Tuesday's announcement, three of the last six Nobel Prizes in Physics were awarded to physicists working "in astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology," noted Physics World magazine, which considered it unlikely that the work associated with the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope would be rewarded this year.
Last year, the Swedish Academy awarded the prize to Alain Aspect (French), John Clauser (American) and Anton Zeilinger (Austrian), pioneers of the revolutionary mechanisms of quantum physics.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.