Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Agostini, Krausz, and L’Huillier

[jahnu]

For reference:

> Attosecond pulses: Flashes of light that last only a few billionths of a billionth of a second. In one attosecond, light covers a distance of 0.3 nanometers (one nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter). This corresponds to the diameter of a water molecule.

> Femtosecond pulses: Flashes of light that last one millionth of a billionth of a second – about one thousand times longer than attopulses.

https://www.mpg.de/9298413/F002_focus_024-031.pdf

[noobermin]

There is some nice sweet irony here. Very marginal inside baseball. I know of one of the recipients although indirectly. I felt like their group was kept around their university physics dept because they were known to be good in that field, while generally their colleagues were generally not respected as their physics (which was derisively deemed "AMO" as if it were an epithet) was not seen as "fundamental" enough by the particle physics people who held high administrative positions in the department. Fast forward a few years, and first Gerard Morou and Donna Strickland and Authur Ashkin got the Nobel for CPA and optical trapping, and now we have a nobel for research into attosecond physics.

There was a nobel prize for the Higgs, but SUSY and all the other sorts of things particle physicists hinged on...well that didn't peter out, did it?

[urthor]

Academic politics is something else.

I thought for awhile those guys got lucky and skip office politics.

Then I realize that PhD level IQs + pressure to get into the fancy journals means that the politics is 古典小說 tier.

[pyb]

Surprising/doubtful, never heard of AMO physics being marginalised anywhere.

[mjfl]

seems absurd. AMO is the only opportunity to study high energy physics where you're not a cog in a giant machine.

[daoboy]

An attosecond is to a second what a second is to the age of the universe.

[boringg]

I thought you were being glib but no: "An attosecond is so short that that the number of them in one second is the same as the number of seconds that have elapsed since the universe came into existence, 13.8 billion years ago. On a more relatable scale, we can imagine a fash of light being sent from one end of a room to the opposite wall – this takes ten billion attoseconds."

That's truly amazing that we can measure at that detail. Mind blowing actually.

[matsemann]

I really enjoy the accompanied "Popular science background"-paper the Nobel Committee releases together with the awards. It's linked on the page, but a direct link that explains the contributions of this award is here: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicspr...

[sidcool]

How the hell do they do it! I can't even reduce 100 ms latency from my API calls.

[Gooblebrai]

Neat! This comparison makes easier to understand the magnitude.

[agnivade]

How much longer this is from the plank time?

[yard2010]

This makes me feel empty

[apienx]

Swedish paper reported that L’Huillier was lecturing when the announcement took place, and just proceeded with the lesson as if nothing happened. Kept their cool!

https://www.dn.se/sverige/nobelpristagaren-anne-l-huillier-f...

[bjornsing]

Just had a call with an old classmate that works in the same department (and even same division). He recounted another fun anecdote: The PhD students in the department had set up a room to watch the Nobel committee’s press conference as usual. They were pleasantly surprised when their professor started talking from the room next door. So she kept her cool to the very end. :)

[bradrn]

Also commented on at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37749891.

[solarist]

L’Huillier, who became the fifth woman to win the physics prize, was teaching when she received the call from the committee, having the advantage of being in the same time zone as the committee.

(On a side note, Bing chat already knows now that she won the prize. Color me impressed.)

[scandinavian]

> (On a side note, Bing chat already knows now that she won the prize. Color me impressed.)

It actually doesn't. Bing searches for your query and uses plain old search results as extra context for the actual LLM. GPT-4 still has the same knowledge cutoff as when the model was last trained.

Here's what it feeds to the model when searching for "nobel prize in physics 2023":

https://pastebin.com/raw/MhW4EmTx

[tpmx]

Photo from that lecture at Lund University, Sweden:

https://twitter.com/lantisfjantis/status/1709146065985777767

This year's Nobel laureate in physics lectures us after (!!) being notified of her win!!

[jbird11]

I found these illustrations to be really informative

Experimental setup - https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/fig5_fy_en_23.pdf

Light / gas interaction - https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/fig4_fy_en_23.pdf

[gary_0]

I found some details about the prizewinning research here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferenc_Krausz#Research

[j7ake]

Anybody know why Paul Corkum did not get awarded? He won wolf prize along with Krausz and L’Huillier last year.

[inglor_cz]

IIRC Nobels can only have three or fewer laureates per year.

[kaycebasques]

The popular science background that the Nobel organization produced is a readable explanation: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicspr...

[gumby]

Somehow I had this brief image of some ancient, stooped and heavily wrinkled codger being interviewed by the BBC seemingly interrupted while working in the field: "Another Nobel for the study of the electron? That tiny lepton? In this day and age? They should encourage people to work on quantum gravity."

I actually think this work is cool so I can't explain that passing image. Sometimes our brains are weird.

[RantyDave]

So, and I'm feeling a bit stupid here, not visible light? Because the pulse must be a complete wave, right? It goes from not being there, to being there, to not being there. And "a few dozen attoseconds" is very much shorter than the wave period of visible light. These flashes are low end x-rays?

[thrownawaysz]

Hungary 2 in 2 so far

[sebstefan]

I was going to say the same for France

Same as you though, does it really matter if we can't fucking keep them working in our universities...

[rurban]

Because they are actually from the Mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)

[Majestic121]

There is something about Hungary and extremely smart people : https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

[HerculePoirot]

> Prize share: 1/3

(x 3)

Can someone elaborate on these weights ? Are there occurrences where the attribution weights are different between laureates ?

[nuccy]

Yes, if a Nobel prize is given for two different topics (for three people, first person - one topic, other two - another topic) then 1/2, 1/4, 1/4 shares will be assigned, for example the prize in physics in 2019 [1].

1. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2019/summary/

[ivh]

Yes, it can also be split 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/4, e.g. when two competing efforts are recognized, one of which was two people. The rule that at most three people can share the pize can make this awkward.

[amelius]

If the pulses are so short, would it be possible to create an EUV light source from this technology?

[fsh]

Lithography requires the highest possible average intensity, while the pulse length is irrelevant. The laser-driven tin plasma sources used in EUV lithography produce around 7 orders of magnitude more power than the most powerful sources based on high harmonic generation.

[robinduckett]

Page not found?

[asicsp]

I see this:

>The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter"

There's also a link to press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/press-release...

[belter]

Page is up - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/summary/

[appleaday1]

This is amazing :)

[drt5b7j]

> The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter"

[mdisc0rd]

Can someone ELI5 what exactly they discovered?

[dagw]

A way to turn a light on and off really really fast.

If you want an ELI13-and-paid-attention-in-science-class then this covers it pretty well https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicspr...

[thsksbd]

To add to what was said in the other answers, turning light on and off very quickly broadens the source so that every frequency is present (i.e. take the Fourier transform of a delta) but still focasable to a narrow point.

[sidkshatriya]

While some teams confirmed superconductity in LK99 other teams got a negative result. The consensus amongst the solid-state community at the moment is the LK99 is NOT superconductive at room temperature.

How is that possible ? There are often many effects at play in Physics. Certain phenomena can be explained in other ways. There are often measurement issues, modelling issues and a haste to say "me too" as prestige and prizes are in play.

Surely HN or any human would root for room temperature superconductivity. It would be a massive technical progress. It is a pity that it did not pan out.

Until the widespread consensus is that LK99 is a room temperature superconductor and many teams are able to reproduce the result there is no chance a nobel prize will be awarded for this.

There usually a lag between a great discovery and a nobel. The prize committe is conservative that way. They want to make sure the science works out and they did not get carried away in the hype of the moment.

[ivan_gammel]

It is not how it works. First, they haven’t really made yet a verified discovery. They may be into something but years may pass before it will be designated as a scientific breakthrough. Then their work must be considered influential enough so that they will be nominated by someone who can do that. Then they must be selected by the committee. It is a long journey and many other discoveries are being made along the way reducing their chances. So there’s absolutely no reason to think they could have received a Nobel Prize this year.