The 2023 Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists for pioneering tools used to study the world of electrons.

Electrons are sub-atomic particles that play a role in many phenomena we see every day, from electricity to magnetism. This year’s three Nobel physics laureates demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light in order to investigate processes that involve electrons.

Pierre Agostini from The Ohio State University in the US, Ferenc Krausz from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany and Anne L’Huillier from Lund University in Sweden will share the prize sum of 11 million Swedish kronor (£822,910).

Congrats to Anne & Pierre.

Inside atoms and molecules, electrons zip around at extreme speeds. Their motions can only be captured with super short pulses of light — like camera flashes that last billionths of a billionth of a second. The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics goes to three physicists who have helped create such “attosecond” blasts of laser light.

By offering superfast snapshots of electrons, their research is changing our view of the inner workings of atoms and molecules.

One of the winners is Anne L’Huillier, of Lund University in Sweden. Another is Pierre Agostini at Ohio State University in Columbus. The third is Ferenc Krausz. He works at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. The trio will split 11 million Swedish kronor, or about $1 million in prize money. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the honor October 3.

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Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier won the prize for creating light bursts that last billionths of a billionth of a second.

Quantum entanglement is one of the most astonishing properties of quantum mechanics. If two particles are entangled, the state of one particle cannot be described independently from the other. This is a unique property of the quantum world and forms a crucial difference between classical and quantum theories of physics. It is so important, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”.

The large mass of the top quark, which is greater than any other particle, remains one of the most enduring mysteries of the Standard Model. Why this is so remains unexplained, however, the top quark has many unique properties to exploit as a result. The top quark is so heavy that it is extremely unstable and decays before it has time to hadronise, transferring all of its quantum numbers to its decay particles. Physicists can detect these decay particles and thus reconstruct the quantum state of a top quark, a feat that is impossible with any other quark. Most importantly, they can measure its spin and use it to show that entanglement can be studied in top-quark-pair production at the LHC.

Entanglement has indeed been measured in the past, but not quite like this. Most previous entanglement measurements involved low non-relativistic energies, typically utilising photons or electrons. The LHC collides protons with an incredibly high centre-of-mass energy. The data used in ATLAS’ new measurement were obtained from collisions at 13 TeV collected between 2015 and 2018. This means researchers are delving into an energy scale over 12 orders of magnitude (a thousand billion times) higher than typical laboratory experiments.