Arthur Ashkin of US, Gerard Mourou of France, and Donna Strickland of Canada have won Nobel Prize in Physics for “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of Laser Physics”.
The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences on Tuesday awarded half the 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize to the scientists for inventions that have “revolutionised laser physics”, according to the official Nobel Prize website.
“Extremely small objects and incredibly rapid processes are now being seen in a new light. Advanced precision instruments are opening up unexplored areas of research and a multitude of industrial and medical applications,” the notification further cited.
The academy decided to award one half to Ashkin “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems” and the other half jointly to Mourou and Strickland “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses”.
Last year’s physics prize went to three Americans who used abstruse theory and ingenious equipment design to detect the faint ripples in the universe called gravitational waves.
On Monday, American James Allison and Japan’s Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel medicine prize for groundbreaking work in fighting cancer with the body’s own immune system.
The Nobel chemistry prize comes on Wednesday, followed by the peace prize on Friday. The economics prize, which is not technically a Nobel, will be announced on October 8.
