The North American Arthur Ashkin (1922), the French Gérard Mourou (1944) and the Canadian Donna Strickland (1959) have received the Nobel Prize in Physics of 2018 «for their revolutionary inventions in the field of laser physics», as just announced the Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden, in Stockholm. One half of the award is for Arthur Ashkin «for optical tweezers and their application in biological systems» and the other half is for Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland «for their method of generating high-intensity ultra-short optical pulses». Strickland is the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, after getting it Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963, both born in the current Poland. Three Americans (Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne) won the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 «for their decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and to the observation of gravitational waves».
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Arthur Ashkin, 96 years old, invented optical tweezers that, with their laser fingers, grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. «With this new tool, Ashkin made an old science fiction dream: move physical objects using the pressure of light radiation, and get the laser light to push small particles into the center of the light beam and hold them there. had been invented, «explains the Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden in a statement. In 1987, Ashkin used the tweezers to capture live bacteria without damaging them, which was a scientific breakthrough.
