2023 Nobel Prize in physics: Seeing electrons in brief flashes of light | Explained Premium

The 2023 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by three scientists—Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier—for their “experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses for the study of electron dynamics in matter.”

The 2023 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by three scientists—Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier—for their “experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses for the study of electron dynamics in matter.”

The laureates have been awarded the Prize for experiments that have allowed scientists to produce ultra-short pulses of light, with which they can finally ‘see’ directly into the super-fast world of electrons.

“Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand mechanisms that are governed by electrons,” Eva Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement.

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Electrons are the negatively charged particles of an atom. They zoom around the denser nucleus. Before being able to study them directly, scientists understood their properties through averages.

It’s like taking a picture of a race car. The longer the aperture of the camera is open, the blurrier the picture gets. But if the exposure time is small, only a small amount of light reaches the camera’s sensors, yielding a sharper image. The shorter the exposure time, the sharper the image.

Similarly, the rapid movement of electrons would seem to blur together in the eyes of a camera that couldn’t lower its exposure time to the order of attoseconds.