the French Pierre Agostini and Anne L’Huillier and the Hungarian Ferenc Krausz rewarded for their methods of observing the movement of electrons

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the Frenchman Pierre Agostini, the Austro-Hungarian Ferenc Krausz and the Franco-Swedish Anne L’Huillier on Tuesday October 3. They are rewarded for their experimental methods based on extremely fast pulses of light allowing them to observe the movement of electrons inside atoms and molecules.

Their progress “allowed us to explore processes that were so fast that they were previously impossible to follow”, notes the Nobel committee. The three physicists succeeded in creating pulses of light on the order of attoseconds. “An attosecond is so short that there are as many in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe”reports the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

This announcement was made the day after the Nobel Prize in Medicine, which highlighted the work of Hungarian researcher Katalin Kariko and her American colleague Drew Weissman in the development of messenger RNA vaccines, decisive in the fight against Covid-19.