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The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for creating “flashes of light that are quick sufficient to take snapshots of electrons’ extremely fast actions,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.

Electrons transfer so shortly that their actions were beforehand thought impossible to observe.

But the three physicists “have demonstrated a method to create extraordinarily brief pulses of sunshine that can be utilized to measure the rapid processes in which electrons transfer or change vitality,” the committee said.

It praised the laureates for giving “humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules.”

The movements of electrons inside atoms and molecules are so rapid that they are measured in attoseconds ? an almost incomprehensibly short unit of time. “An attosecond is to 1 second as one second is to the age of the universe,” the committee explained.

“They have been able to, in a sense, provide an illumination tool that enables us to look at the assembly of molecules: how things come together to make a molecule,” Bob Rosner, president of the American Physical Society and a professor on the University of Chicago, informed CNN.

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These actions “happen so shortly that usually we don't know how they really occur or what the sequence of events is,” said Rosner. But the laureates’ work means scientists can now observe how these actions happen, he added.

“Imagine constructing a home. https://notes.io/qETeC have foundation, walls, roof and so on. There’s a sequence to something difficult. For a molecule, should you don’t get the sequence right, you won’t be succesful of assemble it,” stated Rosner..