Nobel rarity: Woman wins award in physics
The 2018 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded Tuesday to Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for their pioneering work to turn lasers into powerful tools.
Mr. Ashkin, a researcher at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, invented “optical tweezers” — focused beams of light that can be used to grab particles, atoms and even living cells and are now widely used to study the machinery of life.
Mr. Mourou, of École Polytechnique in France and the University of Michigan, and Ms. Strickland, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, “paved the way” for the most intense laser beams ever created by humans via a technique that stretches and then amplifies the light beam.
“Billions of people make daily use of optical disk drive, laser printers and optical scanners … millions undergo laser surgery,” said Nobel committee member Olga Botner. “The laser is truly one of the many examples of how a so-called blue sky discovery in a fundamental science eventually may transform our daily lives.”
Ms. Strickland is the first woman to be awarded the physics prize since 1963, when Maria GoeppertMayer was recognized for her work on the structure of nuclei. Marie Curie won the physics prize in 1903 and the chemistry Nobel Prize in 1911. A reporter asked the professor what it felt like to be the third woman in history to win the prize.
“Really? Is that all? I thought there might have been more,” Ms. Strickland responded, sounding surprised. “Obviously, we need to celebrate women physicists, because we’re out there.”
Mr. Ashkin, 96, is the oldest person to be awarded the Nobel Prize. He spent two decades studying the properties of lasers, first recognizing that objects could be drawn toward the center of a beam, where the radiation was most intense. By further focusing the beam with a lens, he developed a “light trap” that could suspend a small spherical object at its center.
Mr. Ashkin used his new tool to hold a particle in place, then an atom, and, eventually, in 1987, a living bacterium. Mr. Ashkin even demonstrated that the tool could be used to reach into a cell without damaging the living system.
Also in the 1980s, Mr. Mourou and Ms. Strickland were working together at the University of Rochester to overcome a problem that had dogged laser research for decades: High-intensity laser beams tended to destroy the material used to amplify them. It was as though scientists were trying to boil water in a pot that couldn’t handle such high temperatures.
The Rochester researchers developed an elegant workaround, which they called “chirped pulse amplification.” First they stretched out the beam with a mile-long fiber optic cable, reducing its peak intensity. Then they amplified the signal to the desired level, before compressing it into an ultrashort, ultrapowerful pulse lasting a tiny fraction of a second.