STOCKHOLM: Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for studying how electrons zip around the atom during in the tiniest fractions of seconds, a field that could one day lead to better electronics or disease diagnoses.
The award went to Pierre Agostini, Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz and French-born Anne L’Huillier for their work with the tiny part of each atom that races around the center and that is fundamental to virtually everything: chemistry, physics, our bodies and our gadgets.
Electrons move around so fast that they have been out of reach of human efforts to isolate them, but by looking at the tiniest fraction of a second possible, scientists now have a “blurry” glimpse of them and that opens up whole new sciences, experts said.
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“The electrons are very fast, and the electrons are really the workforce in everywhere,” Nobel Committee member Mats Larsson said. “Once you can control and understand electrons, you have taken a very big step forward.”
L’Huillier is the fifth woman to receive a Nobel in physics.
To understand how an electron travels, the scientists had to look at an extremely short time period — one quintillionth of a second known as an attosecond — just like a photographer uses a quick shutter speed when photographing a hummingbird.
“Let’s take one second, which is the time of a heartbeat,” Nobel Committee chair Eva Olsson said. To get the realm of the attosecond, that would have to be divided by 1,000 six times.
Physicist Mark Pearce, a Nobel Committee member, said “there are as many attoseconds in a second as there are seconds which have passed since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. So it’s an extremely short period of time.”
But even when they “see” the electron, there’s only so much they can view.
“You can see whether it’s on the one side of a molecule or on the other,” L’Huillier, 65, said. “It’s still very blurry.”
“The electrons are much more like waves, like water waves, than particles and what we try to measure with our technique is the position of the crest of the waves,” she added.
