Laser innovations grab physics Nobel

Abstract

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics to Arthur Ashkin, Donna T. Strickland, and Gérard A. Mourou for “groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics.” Ashkin will receive half of the roughly $1 million prize, and Strickland and Mourou will split the other half. Ashkin, who works from his home laboratory, invented optical tweezers while working at Bell Laboratories in the 1970s and 1980s. He realized that laser light could move particles as small as atoms because light imparts a tiny but meaningful amount of force, enough to hold objects in the center of the light beam. Optical tweezers have found applications across the sciences, says Pak Hyuk Kyu, a physicist at the Institute for Basic Science in Korea. “Right now it’s being used in many different fields,” he says, listing physics, chemistry, and biology. In 1987, Ashkin and Joseph M. Dziedzic