Laser revolution
The 2018 Prize in Physics is awarded to Arthur Ashkin for his invention of optical tweezers and to Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for developing techniques to generate high-intensity, ultrashort optical laser pulses.
THIS year’s Nobel Prize in Physics recognises a trio of scientists who have invented simple yet remarkable techniques to harness the power of lasers that now enable extremely tiny objects, on the one hand, and incredibly fast processes, on the other, to be viewed in a new revealing light. Both inventions have revolutionised the use of laser in basic scientific research, applications and industry. Apart from physics, other fields, including chemistry, biology, medicine and technology, have benefited immensely from the high-precision methods and instruments that have
R. RAMACHANDRAN
resulted from these two award-winning works.
The American physicist Arthur Ashkin (96), formerly with Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, received half the award of nine million Swedish krona ($1.1 million) for his invention of “optical tweezers”. As the name implies, optical tweezers enable one to grab and manipulate the tiniest elements of matter—atoms, molecules, viruses, bacteria, living cells and bits of Dna—with laser beams without any damage to the material being studied. What was the stuff of science fiction, soon after the invention the laser in 1960, is now reality.
The Nobel citation for Ashkin reads, “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems”.
The French physicist Gérard Mourou (74) of École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France, and the Canadian physicist Donna Strickland (59) of the University of Waterloo, Canada, who had been Mourou’s doctoral student while doing this award-winning work at the University of Rochester, New York, share the other half of the Nobel Prize for de- of