(UTV|COLOMBO) – Three scientists have been awarded the 2018 Nobel prize in physics for creating tools from light.
Arthur Ashkin in the US, Gérard Mourou from France, and Donna Strickland in Canada will share the 9m Swedish kronor (£770,000) prize announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Tuesday.
Ashkin, of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, wins half of the prize for his development of “optical tweezers”. The technology has allowed tiny organisms to be handled with beams of light, an effect the awarding committee illustrated by levitating a ping pong ball with a hairdryer.
Mourou and Strickland receive a quarter of the prize each “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses,” the Nobel committee said. “First of all, you have to think it is crazy,” said Strickland, on receiving the call from Stockholm.
Strickland, a laser physicist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, becomes the first woman to win the physics Nobel since Maria Goeppert Mayer was honoured in 1963 for her work on the nuclear shell structure. Strickland is only the third woman in history to win the physics prize.
In a telephone interview with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Strickland said she was unaware only two women had won the prize before her. “We need to celebrate women physicists because we’re out there, and hopefully in time it’ll start to move forward at a faster rate. I’m honoured to be one of those women,” Strickland said.
Ashkin told the Nobel committee that he may not be able to give any interviews because “he is very busy with his latest paper.”
On Monday, James Allison at Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Tasuku Honjo at the University of Kyoto won the 2018 medicine Nobelfor their work on harnessing the immune system to combat cancer.
