macleodmcallister4953

The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for creating “flashes of sunshine which would possibly be short sufficient to take snapshots of electrons’ extraordinarily fast movements,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.

Electrons move so quickly that their actions have been beforehand thought impossible to observe.

But the three physicists “have demonstrated a method to create extremely quick pulses of sunshine that can be utilized to measure the fast processes in which electrons move 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 way, present an illumination software that allows us to observe the meeting of molecules: how things come together to make a molecule,” Bob Rosner, president of the American Physical Society and a professor at the University of Chicago, told CNN.

ADVERTISEMENT

These movements “happen so rapidly that usually we do not 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 movements happen, he added.

“Imagine building a house. You have basis, walls, roof and so forth. https://vikings-man.co.kr/ There’s a sequence to something difficult. For a molecule, when you don’t get the sequence proper, you won’t be ready to assemble it,” said Rosner..