The 2018 Noble Prize in Physics went to Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland, for their work on high-intensity laser pulses.
The Nobel committee announced the award recipients on Tuesday, as half of the 9-million-Swedish kronor ($1.01 million) prize went to Ashkin of the United States and the other half will be shared by Mourou of France and Canada’s Strickland.
Ashkin wins half of the prize for his development of “Optical tweezers” which have allowed tiny organisms to be handled with light beams, while Mourou and Strickland share a quarter of the prize each “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses,” the Noble committee said in a statement.
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The physics prize honors researchers for discoveries in phenomena as enormous as The Big Bang and as tiny as single particles of light.
2017 physics prize went to three Americans who used abstruse theory and ingenious equipment design to detect the faint ripples in the universe called gravitational waves.
The 2018 Nobel Prizes in physiology or medicine was awarded to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo on Monday, for advances in discovering how the immune system can fight off cancer.
The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences will on Friday award the Nobel Peace Prize, which many suggest will go to the US President, Donald Trump for his efforts in the peace treaty between North and South Korea.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded on Wednesday.