Reacción a "Reactions: Nobel Prize in Physics to Agostini, Krausz and L'Huillier for developing light pulses to study the motion of electrons in matter"

This is fantastic news and a long-awaited and long-awaited recognition by the scientific community of optics and ultrafast lasers. Thanks to attophysics, we can now observe processes occurring in nature in times as short as trillionths of a second, something that until a few years ago we could only fantasise about. It is in such a brief world that the movement of electrons within atoms and molecules takes place, and developing a "camera" that allows us to observe them is the first step towards understanding the most fundamental processes in nature.  

Once understood, we can go a step further and manipulate them, for example to create new materials to meet the challenges facing our society. The experimental work of Professors L'Huillier, Agostini and Krausz has been instrumental in the development of such a "photo camera", formed by laser pulses with durations of attoseconds (1 attosecond is 0.000000000000000001 second!). Its creation and characterisation was far from easy. The process that has succeeded in generating these pulses is called high-order harmonic generation, a highly non-linear process that combines several branches of physics: intense laser optics, quantum physics and classical electrodynamics. Although the first experiments were developed in the late 1980s, today we are still refining and understanding the technique of generating these very short pulses.