(VOVWORLD) - Scientists Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for using pulses of light to study the behavior of electrons, the award-giving body said.
 Hans Ellegren, permanent secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences, flanked by Eva Olsson and Mats Larsson, members, announces Nobel Prize winners in Physics, at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden October 3, 2023. (Photo: Reuters) |
The prize, which was raised this year to about 1 million USD, is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The academy said the work by the trio had given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules with applications in fields such as electronics and medical diagnostics.
The laureates' experiments have produced pulses of light so short that they are measured in attoseconds, thus demonstrating that these pulses can be used to provide images of processes inside atoms and molecules, it said in a statement.
L'Huillier works at Lund University in Sweden, Agostini is a professor at Ohio State University in the United States, and Krausz is director at Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics.
Physics is the second Nobel to be awarded this week after Hungarian scientist Katalin Kariko and US colleague Drew Weissman won the medicine prize for making mRNA molecule discoveries that paved the way for COVID-19 vaccines.