(Inside Science) — The 2018 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to three scientists who took lasers to new levels.
The first half of the prize goes to Arthur Ashkin from Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems.” The second half was awarded jointly to Gérard Mourou of the École Polytechnique, Palaiseau in France, and Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo in Canada, “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses.”
Ashkin’s “remarkable invention,” as Göran K. Hansson, the secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences called it during the prize announcement, used the pressure from laser light to move tiny objects like bacteria and viruses toward the center of a beam and hold them there.
The principle was demonstrated on video by Nobel committee member Anders Irbäck, who wielded a hair dryer to elevate a ...
