> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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. :)
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":
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).
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
>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"
> 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"
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.
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.
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.
While some teams confirmed superconductity in LK99 other teams got a negative result. The consensus amongst the solid-state community at the moment is the LK99 is NOT superconductive at room temperature.
How is that possible ? There are often many effects at play in Physics. Certain phenomena can be explained in other ways. There are often measurement issues, modelling issues and a haste to say "me too" as prestige and prizes are in play.
Surely HN or any human would root for room temperature superconductivity. It would be a massive technical progress. It is a pity that it did not pan out.
Until the widespread consensus is that LK99 is a room temperature superconductor and many teams are able to reproduce the result there is no chance a nobel prize will be awarded for this.
There usually a lag between a great discovery and a nobel. The prize committe is conservative that way. They want to make sure the science works out and they did not get carried away in the hype of the moment.
Sometimes I muse that it's the belief of the experimenters themselves that can briefly coerce the world into behaving in a certain way... something quantum many worlds... something something. :)
This is the idea that Schrödinger was attempting to ridicule in his cat thought experiment. The intent is that this idea is intuitively ludicrous. Unfortunately pop culture got hold of it and now, well, "Ooh quantum stuff, put cats everywhere" ...
On the other hand, Greg Egan did a couple of short stories about what if the underlying mathematics (which necessarily governs our universe) is altered when we "discover" weird things about it and this binds us to other universes sharing that mathematics, so we can't go there, and they can't come here, but if they discover something weird about the relationship between Pi and set theory that becomes true here even though we haven't "discovered" that, and if they can choose to discover something different, that is true instead.
Yes it's definitely an idea that can be found here and there in Greg Egan's novels and short stories. Among other places, towards the end of Permutation City when it's suggested that the world beliefs of the inhabitants of Permutation City (humans vs evolved artificial species) are themselves shaping its reality.
It is not how it works. First, they haven’t really made yet a verified discovery. They may be into something but years may pass before it will be designated as a scientific breakthrough. Then their work must be considered influential enough so that they will be nominated by someone who can do that. Then they must be selected by the committee. It is a long journey and many other discoveries are being made along the way reducing their chances. So there’s absolutely no reason to think they could have received a Nobel Prize this year.
To further add to this, one of the fastest Nobel prizes in Physics was also for high temperature superconductivity in 1987, awarded less than 2 years after the discovery was made public (the other which ties with it being the 1957 prize for parity violation).
So even if LK-99 had been easily verified to be a true room temperature superconductor, they'd probably be looking at the 2024 Nobel.
> 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.
https://www.mpg.de/9298413/F002_focus_024-031.pdf