María José García Borge
Research Professor at the Institute for the Structure of Matter, CSIC
I am very excited that the Nobel Prize 2023 has been awarded to this breakthrough in basic research and that it has been awarded to Pierre Agostini, Frenec Krausz and Anne L'Huillier. I am particularly familiar with the careers of Anne L'Huillier and Frenec Krausz, who was recently awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics 2022 and the BBVA Foundation Frontier of Knowledge 2023 prize.
Anne L'Huillier, a theoretician by training, was a pioneer in demonstrating that the generation of very high harmonics is possible, allowing pulses to be produced with a time as short as an attosecond (one part in 10^18 of a second). Frenec Krausz was the first to produce these ultra-short pulses in a controlled manner in his laboratory at the University of Vienna, decades later, in 2001.
These discoveries have made it possible to 'photograph' the movement of electrons in atoms and molecules, allowing us to understand their dynamics and how, for example, their photoionisation occurs. Today, real-time movies of these processes can be made.