Author: Emily Conover / Source: Science News
Fantastic feats performed with lasers have earned three scientists the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics.
Half of the award, which totals 9 million Swedish kronor (about $1 million), went to physicist Arthur Ashkin for his development of optical tweezers. The technique uses laser light to manipulate tiny particles such as viruses and bacteria.
The other half of the prize went to two scientists who created intense, short bursts of laser light. Physicists Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland found a way to produce these powerful laser pulses using a method called chirped pulse amplification, which has been harnessed for purposes such as laser eye surgery.
The award marks only the third time a woman has been awarded the physics Nobel. Previous female winners were Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963.
In his work at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., Ashkin took advantage of the fact that individual subatomic particles of light exert pressure. By focusing a laser beam just so, Ashkin realized that small objects could be trapped and moved around by the forces of the particles of light, or photons.
Ashkin’s Nobel was “a thoroughly well-deserved and long-overdue award,” says physicist Philip Jones of University College London.
Since 1986, when Ashkin’s initial study on optical tweezers was published, the technique’s popularity has exploded. Hundreds of labs across the world now use optical tweezers, says Jones, whose research relies on Ashkin’s work. Optical tweezers have been used for myriad purposes: testing how DNA stretches, studying the forces exerted by individual cells, and initiating chemical reactions between a single pair of atoms, to name a few (SN: 5/12/18, p. 24). By building on the optical tweezer technique, scientists were able to trap and cool atoms, a discovery that led to the 1997 Nobel in physics.
In another flourish…
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