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  • This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics goes to the three scientists Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier.
  • The trio is honored for experiments that gave humanity new tools to explore the world of electrons in atoms and molecules.
  • This year’s most important award is worth around one million francs, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

Ferenc Krausz conducts research as director at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching near Munich and at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. Anne L’Huillier works at Lund University (Sweden) and Pierre Agostini at Ohio State University.

The three researchers have shown a way to generate extremely short light pulses that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy, the Nobel Committee said. The prizewinners’ contributions have enabled the study of processes that occur so quickly that they could not previously be followed.

Light pulses that can be measured are generated in attoseconds

Fast-moving events merge into one another in people’s perception – just as a film consisting of still images is perceived as continuous movement. “If we really want to study short events, we need special technology.”

In the world of electrons, changes would take place in a few tenths of attoseconds. “An attosecond is so short that there are as many of them in one second as there have been seconds since the creation of the universe.” The prizewinners’ experiments produced light pulses that are so short that they are measured in attoseconds. They would have shown that these pulses can be used to provide images of processes in atoms and molecules.

This year’s most important award for physicists is worth a total of eleven million crowns (around 906,400 Swiss francs).

So far, eight Swiss have been honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics


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To date, eight Swiss or Swiss-foreign dual citizens have been honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics, most recently four years ago. These were the award winners:

2019: Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for the discovery of the first exoplanet outside the solar system orbiting a sun-like star

1987: Karl Alexander Müller for the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials

1986: Heinrich Rohrer for the development of the scanning tunnel microscope

1952: Felix Bloch (CH/USA) for the discovery of nuclear induction

[1945: Wolfgang Pauli (A/CH/USA) for the discovery of the exclusion principle

1921: Albert Einstein (D/CH/USA) for the discovery of the law of photoelectric light

1920: Charles Edouard Guillaume for his contributions to precision measurements in physics by discovering the anomalies in nickel steel alloys

Last year, the Frenchman Alain Aspect, the American John F. Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their research in the field of quantum physics.

Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Literature, Peace and Economics still pending

The winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be announced on Wednesday. The announcements for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize will follow on Thursday and Friday. The series ends next Monday with the Nobel Prize in Economics, sponsored by the Swedish Reichsbank.

The ceremonial presentation of the awards traditionally takes place on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the prize founder Alfred Nobel.

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