Pascal Salières reacted Tuesday on franceinfo to the Nobel Prize in physics awarded to the French Anne L’Huillier and Pierre Agostini alongside the Hungarian Ferenc Krausz, for work on the movements of electrons.
“They are ultra-fast, ultra-brief filmmakers since electrons are indeed extremely light and fast particles”, enthused on franceinfo Tuesday October 3 Pascal Salières, research director at CEA Paris Saclay, after the Nobel Prize in physics awarded to Anne L’Huillier and Pierre Agostini, with the Austro-Hungarian Ferenc Krausz. They are three specialists in attosecond technology, a science that allows on a record time scale to observe and potentially manipulate electrons, with applications in chemistry, electronics and one day medicine.
>> Nobel Prize: are you knowledgeable about the winners and their achievements?
To succeed in flashing the electrons “in full motion we need flash, light that is ultra-brief”adds Pascal Salières who wrote his thesis under the supervision of Anne L’Huillier.
franceinfo: Is there pride in seeing French research rewarded?
Pascal Salières: Obviously. I also have great admiration for Anne [L’Huillier] and his humility deserved to be rewarded.
This is a reward for scientists who work abroad. Is this worrying?
No, I do not think so. I think it was very situational. I did my thesis with Anne L’Huillier here in Saclay. She left for personal reasons as she met her husband there.
Are we somehow rewarding camera manufacturers for the infinitely small and infinitely fast?
Yes, they are ultra-fast, ultra-brief filmmakers since indeed electrons are extremely light and fast particles and to be able to flash them in full motion we need flash, light that is ultra- brief. All this happens on the scale of attoseconds, so the billionth, the billionth of a second. It was a source that we did not have until the 1980s. It was Anne L’Huillier who first discovered the process which made it possible to produce these flashes of attosecond light and Pierre Agostini who brought the way to characterize them. It’s one thing to produce them and another thing to measure their duration. Now that we have well-produced, well-characterized flashes, we can use them in a large number of applications ranging from chemistry to physics and semiconductors. This is why this field has just been awarded the Nobel Prize.
What applications can we imagine for this successful research?
This is still very basic research. We are starting to develop applications and there is enormous potential. When we control electrons, we can direct processes around us. We can talk about chemical reactions that we can try to direct so that they produce this or that reagent instead of the one that nature would do. This can make it possible to produce new molecules, new drugs. On electronic components with its flashes of light, we are capable of inducing and suppressing electric currents on the attosecond scale with speeds that are currently unimaginable.
“This would make it possible to accelerate the speed of electronic components: from gigahertz, we could go to terahertz. With these new tools, we are able to revisit a part of physics which until now seemed immeasurable.”
Pascal Salières, research director at CEA Paris Saclayon franceinfo
It’s been several times that researchers working in the broad sense on lasers or optics, is there really a French specialty?
Yes, there really is a French school that has developed. We can talk about [Claude] Cohen-Tannoudji who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. His book on quantum mechanics is truly the bible throughout the world. There is a large school around these lasers which is now reaping the fruits of this work.