The honorees, recognized for work on ultrashort, ultrapowerful laser pulses, and delicate laser manipulation of tiny biological structures, include the first woman to get the physics prize since 1963
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics honors “groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics” on opposite ends of the time and intensity scale. Gérard Mourou of France and Donna Strickland of Canada invented a technique called chirped-pulse amplification that generates extremely short laser pulses that reach extremely high intensity. Arthur Ashkin of the United States invented “optical tweezers,” which use low-power laser beams to manipulate tiny objects such as living cells.
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