NJ scientist becomes oldest Nobel winner

STOCKHOLM >> Three scientists from the United States, Canada and France won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for work with lasers described as revolutionary and bringing science fiction into reality.

The American, Arthur Ashkin, entered the record books of the Nobel Prizes by becoming the oldest laureate at age 96. Donna Strickland, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, became the first woman to win a Nobel in three years and is only the third to have won the prize for physics.

Frenchman Gerard Mourou of the Ecole Polytechnique and University of Michigan will share half of the 9 million kronor ($1.01 million) the prize carries with Strickland. Ashkin, who worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey, gets the other half.

Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences, which chose the winners, said Ashkin’s development of “optical tweezers” that can grab tiny particles such as viruses without damaging them realized “an old dream of science fiction — using the radiation pressure of light to move physical objects.”

The tweezers are “extremely important for measuring small forces on individual molecules, small objects, and this has been very interesting in biology, to understand how things like muscle tissue work, what are the molecule motors behind the muscle tissue,” said David Haviland of the academy’s Nobel committee.

Ashkin said he was pleasantly surprised when he got the 5 a.m. call from Sweden.

“I’m very old and had given up worrying about things like Nobel Prizes,” he told The Associated Press.

Ashkin said he’s currently working on solar power research at his New Jersey home.

Strickland and Mourou helped develop short and intense laser pulses that have broad industrial and medical applications, including laser eye surgery and highly precise machine cutting. The academy said their 1985 article on the technique was “revolutionary.”

“With the technique we have developed, laser power has been increased about a million times, maybe even a billion,” Mourou said in a video statement released by Ecole Polytechnique.

Strickland’s award was the first Nobel Prize in physics to go to a woman since 1963, when it was won by Maria GoeppertMayer; the only other woman to win for physics was Marie Curie in 1903.

“Obviously, we need to celebrate women physicists because we’re out there. And hopefully in time, it’ll start to move forward at a faster rate, maybe,” Strickland said in a phone call with the academy after the prize announcement.

On winning the Nobel, Strickland told The Associated Press: “I just find the whole thing surreal.”