Stockholm (dpa) – This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics goes to the Germany-based researcher Ferenc Krausz, Pierre Agostini in the USA and Anne L’Huillier from France for experiments which have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules. This was announced on Tuesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
As director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching near Munich, Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz conducts research both at the MPQ and at LMU (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität) Munich. Anne L’Huillier works at Lund University (Sweden) and Pierre Agostini at Ohio State University. The three researchers have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy, states the Nobel Committee’s press release. The laureates’ contributions have enabled the investigation of processes that are so rapid they were previously impossible to follow.