A Nobel prize for… Observability?
On the 3rd of October 2023 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for what they described as having “demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.”
Those short pulses of light become flashes for high speed photography. To understand what this means, consider that regular photographs, which you take everyday with your phone or camera, are usually no faster than a hundredth of a second. An attosecond is a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second. In one second, an electron can move around 300,000 km (160,000 miles) — much too far to make any measurement of “where is it now” meaningful.
In a few attoseconds, an electron moves just far enough to see on which side of an atom it is — just enough to start understanding what the electron is doing.
In other words, the Nobel winners found a way to take images which show how the individual components of atoms move.
0 Comments