Nobel Prize in Physics: pioneer researchers including two French are laureate of the prize 2023

All audiences

This university year starts on a good foot! Just when the French government has decided to make the year 2023-2024 the Year of Physics, the Nobel Committee once again granted its prestigious prize to France in this field. Two French researchers Anne L’Huillier and Pierre Agostini, and Austrian researcher Ferenc Krausz, won the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 on Tuesday 3rd October.

The season of Nobel Prizes 2023 is in full swing and it’s the physics field’s turn to be under the spotlights. And again, France is on the front scene of this major discipline, since in 2022 French researcher Alain Aspect was also awarded the prize by the Royal Academy of Science of Sweden. This additional confirmation in the same field is a tribute to the French excellence in physics.

Pioneer researchers

In 2023, three researchers, two French Anne L’Huillier and Pierre Agostini, and Austrian Ferenc Krausz [1], who won this prize for his work on “experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”, according to the official website of the Swedish academy.

French Atomic Energy and Alternative Energy Commission (CEA) added that Anne L’Huillier and Pierre Agostini received the prize “for their work initiated and conducted in the CEA”. Their pioneer work indeed continues on the Attolab platform, research lab bridged with CEA and CNRS, in the Paris-Saclay University. According to CEA, work focus more “on the generation and characterisation of attosecond pulses of light to ultimately probe the dynamics of electrons in matter”, and this work “are now critical to understand many physics, chemistry and biology events”.

A promising discipline

It is just when the Year of Physics is officially launched in France that the awarding of Prizes was announced. The official opening ceremony of this Year of Physics was indeed held on October 3rd in Paris, in the presence of renown scientists, such as Alain Aspect, laureate of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022, and it was the place of the live release of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023!

Designed to improve the attraction of young people and the general audience for physics, the university year 2023-2024 is dedicated to this discipline. Supported among others by the French ministries of education and higher education, this major action is designed to “draw the interest of young people and the larger audience for physics, a critical discipline of our everyday life, but which an insufficient number of students choose to study”. Indeed, there are many events scheduled throughout the year, such as debate-conferences, visits of labs, exhibitions, meetings with scientists, and more. A way to “answer the major current challenge of society”, according to the organisers, because physics is a promising discipline of the future” From the study “of climate change to energy production, from designing medical equipment to developing techno everyday life objects such as smartphones”, physics are critical to “understand the world we live in”, concluded the CNRS.

[1] Ferenc Krausz is a scientist at the Max Planck-Institute for Quantum Optics in Munich.