Ultrashort Periods Of Time
October 3, 2023: Hi all. I’m covering for Andrea Gawrylewski today. Read on for the latest on the roll-out of the Nobel Prizes and the potential impact of satellites on astronomical observations.
—Robin Lloyd, Interim Newsletter Editor
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Day Two of Nobel Prizes Week: Physics
Trailblazers in devising and using ultrafast laser pulses to study the motions of electrons have won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics. The award went to Pierre Agostini of the Ohio State University, Ferenc Krausz of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany and Anne L’Huillier of Lund University in Sweden. (L’Huillier is only the fifth woman to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics.) The laser pulses for these probes are on the scale of the attosecond, the scale over which the motions of electrons typically take place. How brief is that? There are as many attoseconds in a single second as there have been seconds in the entire history of the universe (!).
What they did: In 1987, L’Huillier discovered that passing an infrared laser through a noble gas, such as argon, led to a pattern in the emitted light: a plateau in the frequency. This plateau would prove vital for work done in the early 2000s, when Agostini created multiple 250-attosecond-long pulses of light while Krausz, working independently, generated single 650-attosecond-long pulses.
The impact: Today’s researchers hope to use ultrafast lasers to get clearer views of otherwise blurry atomic processes. Probes with ever shorter pulses could deepen scientists’ understanding of electron dynamics and could lead to the development of novel semiconductors and medical diagnostics.
Ultrashort Periods Of Time
October 3, 2023: Hi all. I’m covering for Andrea Gawrylewski today. Read on for the latest on the roll-out of the Nobel Prizes and the potential impact of satellites on astronomical observations.
—Robin Lloyd, Interim Newsletter Editor
TOP STORIES
Day Two of Nobel Prizes Week: Physics
Trailblazers in devising and using ultrafast laser pulses to study the motions of electrons have won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics. The award went to Pierre Agostini of the Ohio State University, Ferenc Krausz of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany and Anne L’Huillier of Lund University in Sweden. (L’Huillier is only the fifth woman to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics.) The laser pulses for these probes are on the scale of the attosecond, the scale over which the motions of electrons typically take place. How brief is that? There are as many attoseconds in a single second as there have been seconds in the entire history of the universe (!).
What they did: In 1987, L’Huillier discovered that passing an infrared laser through a noble gas, such as argon, led to a pattern in the emitted light: a plateau in the frequency. This plateau would prove vital for work done in the early 2000s, when Agostini created multiple 250-attosecond-long pulses of light while Krausz, working independently, generated single 650-attosecond-long pulses.
The impact: Today’s researchers hope to use ultrafast lasers to get clearer views of otherwise blurry atomic processes. Probes with ever shorter pulses could deepen scientists’ understanding of electron dynamics and could lead to the development of novel semiconductors and medical diagnostics.