2023-10-03 10:59:11
The French scientist Pierre Agostini, the Austrian-Hungarian Ferenc Krausz and the Swedish franc Anne L’Huillier were awarded today with the prize Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of methods that allowed us to improve the study of the dynamics of electrons in atoms, which opens the door to numerous applications such as understanding the behavior of electrons in a material or improving the precision of a medical diagnosis.
«Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier have shown “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,” explained the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences when making the announcement.
And he continued: «In the world of electrons, changes occur in a few tenths of an attosecond; An attosecond is so short that there are as many in a second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe.
The awardees’ experiments did just that: produce light pulses so short that they are measured in attoseconds, thus demonstrating that these pulses can be used to provide images of processes within atoms and molecules.
In 1987, Anne L’Huillier discovered that many different shades of light emerged when she transmitted infrared laser light through a noble gas; This happens because the laser light interacts with the gas atoms, providing additional energy to some electrons that is then emitted as light. L’Huillier has continued to explore this phenomenon, laying the groundwork for further advances.
For its part, Pierre Agostini in 2001 managed to produce and investigate a series of consecutive light pulses, each of which lasted only 250 attoseconds; while Ferenc Krausz was working on another type of experiment, one that allowed the isolation of a single pulse of light lasting 650 attoseconds.
“Now we can open the door to the world of electrons. Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand the mechanisms governed by electrons. The next step will be to use them,” said Eva Olsson, president of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
Pierre Agostini received his doctorate in 1968 from the University of Aix-Marseille (France)is currently a professor at the Ohio State University, Columbus (United States).
Ferenc Krausz He was born in 1962 in Mór (Hungary) and received his doctorate in 1991 from the Vienna University of Technology (Austria); Currently he is director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Germany).
For its part, Anne L’Huillier He was born in 1958 in Paris (France) and received his doctorate in 1986 from the Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris); She is currently a professor at Lund University, Sweden.
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