Three researchers who paved the way for advanced precision laser instruments have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. They trio will split the award of 9 million Swedish kronor (€866,000, $1 million).
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Arthur Ashkin, Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland have won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in the field of laser physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Tuesday.
"The inventions being honored this year have revolutionized laser physics," the Nobel Committee said in a statement. "Advanced precision instruments are opening up unexplored areas of research and a multitude of industrial and medical applications."
The academy honored Ashkin of Bell Laboratories in the US for developing "optical tweezers" that can grab tiny particles, like viruses, without damaging them. He was awarded one half of the prize.
Strickland and Mourou will share the other half, after they were singled out for helping develop laser pulses that can be applied to a broad range of industrial and medical devices.
The two "paved the way towards the shortest and most intense laser pulses created by humankind," the committee said. The technique is today used in corrective eye surgery.
The three winners will share the 9 million krona prize.
Last year's physics prize went to US astrophysicists Barry Barish, Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss for their discovery of gravitational waves, predicted by Albert Einstein over a century ago as part of his theory of general relativity.
"I thought there might have been more," Strickland said, speaking over the phone to reporters at the academy in Stockholm. "But I'm honored to be one of those women. We need to celebrate women physicists because we are out there."
The prize for physics follows Monday's medicine award, which went to American James Allison and Japan's Tasuku Honjo for their research into cancer treatment. Wednesday's Nobel Prize in chemistry will cap off the science awards. The peace prize will be announced on Friday, followed by the economics prize on Monday. There will be no literature award this year after a string of sexual misconduct allegations saw several members of the Swedish Academy board step down.
Inspirational women in science
Many women have provided a rich source of inspiration for young scientists - both male and female - down the years. They've made remarkable discoveries, often despite ingrained sexism within their chosen field.
Born in 1815, Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron. A gifted mathematician, she is said to have written instructions for the first computer program in the mid-1800s. She is considered the first person to realize that computers, still not a reality, had potential beyond mere calculation. Lovelace is known chiefly for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed "Analytical Engine."
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A giant in two fields
Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. Not only that, she was the first person to win one twice. Born in Warsaw in 1867, she became a naturalized French citizen. Curie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics - for research on radiation phenomena - with husband Pierre and physicist Henri Becquerel. She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering radium and polonium.
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Unwinding the double helix
Rosalind Franklin never received a Nobel Prize, although many believe she should have. Biophysicist Franklin was an X-ray crystallographer whose practical work was heavily relied upon by James Watson and Francis Crick in their discovery of the DNA double helix, which won the Nobel prize for medicine. By the time the prize was awarded, Franklin had died of ovarian cancer.
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Insight into insulin
British biochemist Dorothy Hodgkin was a contemporary of Franklin, and the two shared their expertise with one another. Hodgkin developed crystallography techniques to give an insight into the structures of biomolecules and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964, becoming the third woman to do so. Five years after winning, Hodgkin was the first person to decipher the structure of insulin.
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A cellular fountain of youth?
Australian-American Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine in 2009 for her work on telomeres - the protective tips that lie at the end of our chromosomes. Blackburn co-discovered the enzyme telomerase, which allows telomeres to be replenished. Telomerase allows cells to go on dividing, so it appears to influence aging and could have implications in cancer research.
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Shedding light on chimp life
British primatologist Jane Goodall is considered the world's leading expert on chimpanzees and has spent decades studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She came up with names for many of the animals, drawing criticism from some who accused her of anthropomorphizing.
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'The lady of the cells'
Born in Italy in 1909, Rita Levi-Montalcini had her career cut short by Benito Mussolini's laws banning Jews from academia. Undeterred, she set up a lab in her bedroom and studied the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos. After the war, she worked in St. Louis, where she isolated Nerve Growth Factor from cancer tissues. She shared a 1986 Nobel Prize for that with colleague Stanley Cohen.
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Neutron stars and green men
In 1967, Northern Irish physicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered a signal that pulsed at a regular rate. The signal, detected by radio telescope, was dubbed the "little green man." It turned out not to be alien communication, but a rapidly spinning neutron star - the first "pulsar" to be detected. In 1974, her supervisor jointly won a Nobel Prize for pulsar work. Bell Burnell was not a recipient.
