2023 Nobel Prize in Physics: Seeing electrons through brief pulses of light | Explained

The 2023 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by three scientists—Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier—for their “experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses for the study of electron dynamics in matter.” The laureates have been awarded the Prize for experiments that have allowed scientists to produce ultra-short pulses of light, with which they can finally ‘see’ directly into the super-fast world of electrons. The technology used to produce these pulses couldn’t be refined any further, so physicists believed the femtosecond to be the hard lower limit Yet ‘seeing’ electrons required an even shorter flash of light. By fine-tuning the setup used to produce the overtones, scientists realised that it should be possible to create intense pulses of light each a few attoseconds long, with destructive interference ensuring that they didn’t last for longer. Attosecond pulses allow scientists to capture ‘images’ of activities that happen in incredibly short time spans.