Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Agostini, Krausz, and L’Huillier
nobelprize.orgFor reference:
> Attosecond pulses: Flashes of light that last only a few billionths of a billionth of a second. In one attosecond, light covers a distance of 0.3 nanometers (one nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter). This corresponds to the diameter of a water molecule.
> Femtosecond pulses: Flashes of light that last one millionth of a billionth of a second – about one thousand times longer than attopulses.
There is some nice sweet irony here. Very marginal inside baseball. I know of one of the recipients although indirectly. I felt like their group was kept around their university physics dept because they were known to be good in that field, while generally their colleagues were generally not respected as their physics (which was derisively deemed "AMO" as if it were an epithet) was not seen as "fundamental" enough by the particle physics people who held high administrative positions in the department. Fast forward a few years, and first Gerard Morou and Donna Strickland and Authur Ashkin got the Nobel for CPA and optical trapping, and now we have a nobel for research into attosecond physics.
There was a nobel prize for the Higgs, but SUSY and all the other sorts of things particle physicists hinged on...well that didn't peter out, did it?
Academic politics is something else.
I thought for awhile those guys got lucky and skip office politics.
Then I realize that PhD level IQs + pressure to get into the fancy journals means that the politics is 古典小說 tier.
> Academic politics is something else.
There is a famous formulation of this known as Sayre's law[1], which is often stated via the quote "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake. That is why academic politics are so bitter," which wikipedia attributes to Charles Philip Issawi.
Link didn't work because of the apostrophe. Here's a fixed link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
posting a mobile link? the original one is fine too, aside using 1-based indexing
I’m advertising, where I work, it’s 100% this
That's a wonderful sum up. The pettiness often drive you insane, when you read the comments from reviewer 2
In french academic circles, we use the word "mandarin" to refer to a powerful academic figure.
Cool. In the UK that's used for powerful civil servants.
Understood it that way in french too.
The Chinese translates to, "classical novels," according to Google.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Chinese_Novels
They're about court life and conflict, so of course they're full of court politics and intrigue
I'm really intrigued, but I can't read Chinese (yet!) - would you be able to tell me in which person these are written?
As an anglophone, I really enjoyed the Water Margin podcast [1] which is a tranlastion of one of the great classics in full length, and with appropriate explanations for contemporarty cultural context.
I'm a native Chinese speaker but I have no idea what OP means by "古典小說 tier".
武侠小说 may be more appropriate.
Maybe it’s not Chinese but uses Chinese characters. Not all Latin character use is English.
It is. I know what 古典小說 is (others have already said, "classic novels").
I just don't know what "古典小說 tier" means since I don't remembered they're known for "high-intelligent politics".
Maybe for context, the fact that high-ranking public servants in the West are known as "Mandarins" should indicate the reputation of Chinese government officials for political intrigue.
The Big 4 novels contain a lot of public servants.
If academic is all politics and favoritism then wouldn't that also apply to the prizes at the top? The people deciding or at least confirming scientific breakthroughs for stuff like nobel prizes must be scientists too, no? So if it's all politics, why are they immune to it?
There's plenty of politics and arbitrariness to Nobel prizes (especially in non-science prizes, eg giving Obama or Malala the peace prize), which probably makes it less of an issue that there may be some politicking within the small group of potential laureates since who among them actually wins is relatively arbitrary.
Eg since only 3 people can win a prize, you can have cases like Francois Englert and Peter Higgs winning the prize for the Higgs Boson despite 4 other scientists having published papers on the same thing around the same time, and the scientists at the LHC who actually confirmed its existence.
Similarly, a work can have won a prize, but if one of the authors passes away before the nomination is made, that person misses out on the title.
> then wouldn't that also apply to the prizes at the top?
It does, but the politics and favoritism is happening within a heavily selected group of very, very competent people. Plenty of people get snubbed for petty reasons, but they get snubbed in favor of others who are also doing Nobel-worthy work.
Surprising/doubtful, never heard of AMO physics being marginalised anywhere.
I can vouch, I'm in a heavily particle/astro dominated dept and AMO is looked down upon.
seems absurd. AMO is the only opportunity to study high energy physics where you're not a cog in a giant machine.
An attosecond is to a second what a second is to the age of the universe.
I thought you were being glib but no: "An attosecond is so short that that the number of them in one second is the same as the number of seconds that have elapsed since the universe came into existence, 13.8 billion years ago. On a more relatable scale, we can imagine a fash of light being sent from one end of a room to the opposite wall – this takes ten billion attoseconds."
That's truly amazing that we can measure at that detail. Mind blowing actually.
I really enjoy the accompanied "Popular science background"-paper the Nobel Committee releases together with the awards. It's linked on the page, but a direct link that explains the contributions of this award is here: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicspr...
How the hell do they do it! I can't even reduce 100 ms latency from my API calls.
Superimposing light waves at various frequencies—-similar to how some sound canceling headphones work with sound waves, where sounds cancel if of different phases—where the top of one wave starts at the same time the bottom of the second wave does. It does this by creating overtones when the light hits a gas. It’s not just turning on light and turning it off again like a switch. Maybe try superimposing your API calls.
Linked elsewhere in this thread:
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicspr...
I understand (at an undergrad level) superimposing light waves. But this blows my mind:
At the same time, Ferenc Krausz and his research group in Austria were working on a technique that could select a single pulse – like a carriage being uncoupled from a train and switched to another track. The pulse they succeeded in isolating lasted 650 attoseconds
Understanding it at a high-level certainly doesn’t take away from the achievement one bit. You still have to be incredibly precise and know the techniques inside and out. Obviously everyone agrees since they received a Nobel Prize.
Don't be too hard on yourself. We can't all be Nobel laureates.
Indeed - the state of HTLM parsing is not so bad that improving it might produce Nobel Laureates...
Sure, if you can parse it with regex! ;)
Damn, I meant HTML !
Don't tell the HFTs about these laser thingies!
I know it's said in a jest. 100ms overall is extra high (not just reduce).
Neat! This comparison makes easier to understand the magnitude.
How much longer this is from the plank time?
This makes me feel empty
You are the universe, no reason to feel empty :)
> am the universe > literally mostly empty > no reason to feel empty?
The universe is not empty, even 'empty space' is not empty.
Swedish paper reported that L’Huillier was lecturing when the announcement took place, and just proceeded with the lesson as if nothing happened. Kept their cool!
https://www.dn.se/sverige/nobelpristagaren-anne-l-huillier-f...
Just had a call with an old classmate that works in the same department (and even same division). He recounted another fun anecdote: The PhD students in the department had set up a room to watch the Nobel committee’s press conference as usual. They were pleasantly surprised when their professor started talking from the room next door. So she kept her cool to the very end. :)
Also commented on at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37749891.
L’Huillier, who became the fifth woman to win the physics prize, was teaching when she received the call from the committee, having the advantage of being in the same time zone as the committee.
(On a side note, Bing chat already knows now that she won the prize. Color me impressed.)
> (On a side note, Bing chat already knows now that she won the prize. Color me impressed.)
It actually doesn't. Bing searches for your query and uses plain old search results as extra context for the actual LLM. GPT-4 still has the same knowledge cutoff as when the model was last trained.
Here's what it feeds to the model when searching for "nobel prize in physics 2023":
How are you getting this? I is it visible to the browser (client)?
Yes, there's a websocket that contains all bing chat communication.
which?
wss://sydney.bing.com/sydney/ChatHub
This is using Chrome.
Photo from that lecture at Lund University, Sweden:
https://twitter.com/lantisfjantis/status/1709146065985777767
This year's Nobel laureate in physics lectures us after (!!) being notified of her win!!
I like how lantisfjantis then goes on to report he's astounded that she turned off her phone for the remaining half of the lecture.
Like no shit, you try to carry on a lecture while like 20 different journalists try to call you! The youth of today! ;)
maybe she turn on her phone just for the call to come, then back to normal
Yeah, she had it "off" for the lecture and turned it on during the break, which is when they reached her (in Sweden course lectures are almost always divided into several 45 min blocks, with a break in between each block).
My son was also in this class and there is a video of when they applaud her and she tries to continue with the lesson.
Is it up in public anywhere decent, or are the kids just putting it on tiktok, snapchat et al?
Seems like maybe the university could spring for a laser pointer instead of a long stick.
They tried, but the dot was only visible for a fraction of a second ...
Hehe, ok, just this once then :)
I understand, low powered red laser pointers are difficult to see for people with color blindness. And the high powered laser pointers are legal only in some countries. A long stick just works.
I expect they did spring for it when the room was last remodelled, but since then for sure the batteries have died several times, some lecturer brought it with them to their office by mistake and forgot it there, and the students have stolen it.
The stick however, it remains.
The best professors I had in my time in university were the ones who didn't let technology get in the way of effective teaching. The ones who grabbed the newest technology were the ones willing to waste combined days of time (that's a big lecture hall; there could easily be hundreds of students in that class).
I guarantee the university would have let her expense a laser pointer, but those break, run out of batteries, and can be harder to place accurately or spot. Sticks just work.
I found these illustrations to be really informative
Experimental setup - https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/fig5_fy_en_23.pdf
Light / gas interaction - https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/fig4_fy_en_23.pdf
I found some details about the prizewinning research here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferenc_Krausz#Research
Anybody know why Paul Corkum did not get awarded? He won wolf prize along with Krausz and L’Huillier last year.
IIRC Nobels can only have three or fewer laureates per year.
The popular science background that the Nobel organization produced is a readable explanation: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicspr...
Somehow I had this brief image of some ancient, stooped and heavily wrinkled codger being interviewed by the BBC seemingly interrupted while working in the field: "Another Nobel for the study of the electron? That tiny lepton? In this day and age? They should encourage people to work on quantum gravity."
I actually think this work is cool so I can't explain that passing image. Sometimes our brains are weird.
So, and I'm feeling a bit stupid here, not visible light? Because the pulse must be a complete wave, right? It goes from not being there, to being there, to not being there. And "a few dozen attoseconds" is very much shorter than the wave period of visible light. These flashes are low end x-rays?
Hungary 2 in 2 so far
I was going to say the same for France
Same as you though, does it really matter if we can't fucking keep them working in our universities...
It doesn’t matter. These things help all of humanity.
Because they are actually from the Mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
There is something about Hungary and extremely smart people : https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
Just have to leave the country to be successful, or worse, to not get killed by the same people what will be the first to boast about your achievements abroad.
Some people are proud of where other people were born, regardless of where these other people work.
Some people are proud of where other people work, regardless of where these other people were born.
These are very different views of the world /shrug
Well, what do you expect?
In his novel Budapest, the Brazilian novelist Chico Buarque writes that Hungarian “is rumored to be the only tongue in the world the devil respects.”
Ha, ha; this is the ultimate compliment!
The language and the misery? :)
The Hungarian ability to produce world-class scientists went considerably down after the Holocaust.
> Prize share: 1/3
(x 3)
Can someone elaborate on these weights ? Are there occurrences where the attribution weights are different between laureates ?
Yes, if a Nobel prize is given for two different topics (for three people, first person - one topic, other two - another topic) then 1/2, 1/4, 1/4 shares will be assigned, for example the prize in physics in 2019 [1].
Yes, it can also be split 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/4, e.g. when two competing efforts are recognized, one of which was two people. The rule that at most three people can share the pize can make this awkward.
If the pulses are so short, would it be possible to create an EUV light source from this technology?
Lithography requires the highest possible average intensity, while the pulse length is irrelevant. The laser-driven tin plasma sources used in EUV lithography produce around 7 orders of magnitude more power than the most powerful sources based on high harmonic generation.
> while the pulse length is irrelevant
I was thinking along the lines of: 1 attosecond corresponds to .3nm, so very short wavelength, so very deep UV.
The wave length and pulse length aren't the same thing though. The short pulsed lasers actually consists of light that have many different wave lengths in them!
Yes, but shouldn't there be a peak in the spectrum near the frequency corresponding to the pulselength?
Page not found?
I see this:
>The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter"
There's also a link to press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/press-release...
This is amazing :)
> The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter"
Can someone ELI5 what exactly they discovered?
A way to turn a light on and off really really fast.
If you want an ELI13-and-paid-attention-in-science-class then this covers it pretty well https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicspr...
I found this lab tour with Ferenc Krausz himself to be a great introduction to the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZIUJb85BAQ
Like, realy realy realy fast, one billionth of one billionth of a second.
what is it useful for ? (honnest question)
You know how strobe light photography lets you 'freeze' very fast moving things so you can study what they look like mid motion. This is used for basically that, except for much much smaller things moving much much faster.
that's ELI5
The wavelength at the size of a watermolecule in the range of Exahertz x-ray rather implies very precise laser pulses because the focal point is proportional to the wavelength. It is also relevant for energy transfer into molecules at resonant frequencies.
from the last paragraph linked above:
> For example, attosecond pulses can be used to push molecules, which emit a measurable signal. The signal from the molecules has a special structure, a type of fingerprint that reveals what molecule it is, and the possible applications of this include medical diagnostics.
Basically it's a more precise higher energy X-Ray laser.
I believe the fast turning on and off is a byproduct of a basic method (high-harmonic generation). They do stress the importance of short pulses, but this again may have to do with decoherence of the focal point and not so much the speed of electrons inside the molecule, which is only a model (i.e. relativistic) and remains to be investigated with this new method.
Another benefit of pulsing light really fast is that you can more easily perform studies of really delicate things (eg proteins) because you effectively have higher control over the amount of energy you're pouring into the sample. That isn't directly what they were working on here, but a similar extremely high frequency pulsing is one of the things that makes free-electron lasers 'next generation' compared to synchrotrons.
It's like using flash when photographing, with these ultra short pulses one could see how electrons move inside atoms and molecules.
You will need a really low f-stop if the exposure is one attosecond
No, you just need an intense flash.
To add to what was said in the other answers, turning light on and off very quickly broadens the source so that every frequency is present (i.e. take the Fourier transform of a delta) but still focasable to a narrow point.