SCIENCE FICTION INTO REALITY: NOBEL PRIZE HONORS LASER WORK

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United States, Canada and France won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for revolutionizing the use of lasers in research, finding ways to make them deliver more powerful flashes of light and even to act like tiny tweezers.

Their work paved the way for laser eye surgery to improve vision and studies that can manipulate cells and their innards.

Arthur Ashkin, the American who developed “optical tweezers,” became the oldest Nobel Prize laureate at age 96. And Donna Strickland, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, became only the third woman to win the physics Nobel, and the first in 55 years.

Strickland and the third winner, Frenchman Gerard Mourou of the Ecole Polytechnique and University of Michigan, developed a way to generate highintensity, ultrashort bursts of laser light. They share half the 9 million kronor ($1.01 million) prize, while the other half goes to Ashkin, who worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey.

“I’m very old and had given up worrying about things like Nobel Prizes,” Ashkin said when he found out he had won.

He said he’s working on solar energy research at his New Jersey home.

The work of the three winners constitutes “fundamental breakthroughs in physics that led to tools that are now being used all over science,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.