Scientists tracking ever elusive electron win Nobel

French physicists Anne L’Huillier, Pieree Agostino and Hungarian Ferenc Krausz shared the Nobel Prize for Physics, 2023 for their discovery of the way to track the sub-atomic particle electron. The electron was discovered in 1887. It rotated around the nucleus inside an atom in varying orbits, and sometimes escapes the atom and then is drawn back into the nucleus. And this happens at unimaginable speeds. The blink of an eye would be a crude description. It is measured in what is called attosecond, a time scale to measure the movement of an electron. It is the billionth of a billionth of a second. When a laser beam is directed at an atom, the movement of the electron lights for an attosecond and disappears. This is what Anne L’Huillier discovered in the 1980s.

Ferenc Krausz in 2000s got to the capture the electron’s image for 250 attoseconds. And Pierre Agostini improved upon it by holding the electron image for 650 attoseconds. This is called the attosecond physics! It is just the beginning of what can be done to track the electron. And of what use is this achievement? It can be used as a diagnostic tool to profile changes in a disease by tracking the changing contours of an electron, and the insight it would provide would be invaluable because it would reveal the inner working of a protein comprising atoms and molecules, and tracing the movement of the electron would unveil the secrets as it were. But this lies in the future. But using the laser beam to track the electron is an exciting instruments.

The distinguishing feature of the Nobel for Physics this year is that one of the three is a woman. Anne L’Huillier is just the fifth woman to win the Nobel for Physics in the history of the prize of the last 123 years. This perpetuates in the gender stereotyping that women and physics and women and mathematics do not go together. But when a woman wins a Nobel in physics, it shows that there is nothing to prevent a woman from doing physics. And it can also be argued that so few women have won the Nobel for physics just proves the trend. Of course, the Nobel committee cannot go looking for women to give the prize to. But there is need to break the stereotyping by looking at work being done by women in the field of physics, and the research laboratories and the universities to highlight the work of women in physics.

There is a parallel between the Nobel for Medicine and Nobel for Physics prizes this year. While the Nobel for Medicine went for work on mRNA as a vehicle for delivering vaccines, the discovery of tracking the electron through laser beam on the smallest possible time scale will serve as instrument for getting the better understanding of a material or profile a disease hidden inside the atom or molecule of a protein. This must be a coincidence.

There is, however, this irony that the Nobel prize in the sciences is in a slow motion mode compared to the pace of developments in the fields of sciences. The laser beam technique and the attosecond physics has been around for more than 20 years before it caught the attention of the jury. It would not be a bad idea for the existence of more prizes on the lines of the Nobel which would bring recognition to work being done in so many new fields that have emerged in the last few decades. The Nobel would remain a sort of a gold standard, but it clearly remains inadequate in a blooming world of science and technology.