by Andrew Grant
Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou, and Donna Strickland are to be awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Tuesday. Ashkin, of Bell Labs in New Jersey, will receive half of the 9 million Swedish krona (roughly $1 million) prize; Mourou, of École Polytechnique in France and the University of Michigan, and Strickland, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, will split the other half.
The Royal Swedish Academy is honoring Ashkin for his invention of optical tweezers to trap and manipulate particles and living cells. In the 1970s, while attempting to exploit the radiation pressure of laser beams to push dielectric spheres, he discovered that another force nudged the objects toward the region of highest light intensity. Ashkin subsequently developed ways to trap, rather than just push, objects, and to adapt the technique for manipulating atoms and then viruses, bacteria, and other biological organisms.
Mourou and Strickland developed chirped pulse amplification, in which an initial short laser pulse is stretched, amplified, and then compressed to create far more intense light. Spurred by the duo’s 1985 paper, scientists have steadily improved at generating ultrashort intense laser pulses, fostering advances in data storage, the measurement of femtosecond- and even attosecond-duration phenomena, and more. Citing its mission to recognize inventions that benefit humankind, the Royal Swedish Academy also highlighted how Mourou and Strickland’s work has enabled the production of surgical stents and the use of lasers to correct vision.
When she receives her Nobel medal in December, Strickland will become the third woman to receive the physics prize out of 209 laureates, and the first since Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963.