Pierre Agostini
Facts
© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Clément Morin
Pierre Agostini
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023
Born: 23 July 1941, Tunis, French protectorate of Tunisia (now Tunisia)
Affiliation at the time of the award: The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
Prize motivation: “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”
Prize share: 1/3
Work
In the world of electrons, changes occur in a few tenths of an attosecond. An attosecond is one billionth of a billionth of a second. Experiments with such short pulses of light make it possible to provide images of processes taking place inside atoms and molecules. In 2001, Pierre Agostini succeeded in producing and investigating a series of consecutive light pulses, in which each pulse lasted just 250 attoseconds. Potential applications of attosecond pulses include in electronics and medical diagnostics.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
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