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Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Agostini, Krausz, and L’Huillier
- v3ss0n 3y ago[flagged]
- ivan_gammel 3y agoIt is not how it works. First, they haven’t really made yet a verified discovery. They may be into something but years may pass before it will be designated as a scientific breakthrough. Then their work must be considered influential enough so that they will be nominated by someone who can do that. Then they must be selected by the committee. It is a long journey and many other discoveries are being made along the way reducing their chances. So there’s absolutely no reason to think they could have received a Nobel Prize this year.
- dotnet00 3y agoTo further add to this, one of the fastest Nobel prizes in Physics was also for high temperature superconductivity in 1987, awarded less than 2 years after the discovery was made public (the other which ties with it being the 1957 prize for parity violation). So even if LK-99 had been easily verified to be a true room temperature superconductor, they'd probably be looking at the 2024 Nobel.
- sidkshatriya 3y agoWhile some teams confirmed superconductity in LK99 other teams got a negative result. The consensus amongst the solid-state community at the moment is the LK99 is NOT superconductive at room temperature. How is that possible ? There are often many effects at play in Physics. Certain phenomena can be explained in other ways. There are often measurement issues, modelling issues and a haste to say "me too" as prestige and prizes are in play. Surely HN or any human would root for room temperature superconductivity. It would be a massive technical progress. It is a pity that it did not pan out. Until the widespread consensus is that LK99 is a room temperature superconductor and many teams are able to reproduce the result there is no chance a nobel prize will be awarded for this. There usually a lag between a great discovery and a nobel. The prize committe is conservative that way. They want to make sure the science works out and they did not get carried away in the hype of the moment.
- throw310822 3y agoSometimes I muse that it's the belief of the experimenters themselves that can briefly coerce the world into behaving in a certain way... something quantum many worlds... something something. :)
- tialaramex 3y agoThis is the idea that Schrödinger was attempting to ridicule in his cat thought experiment. The intent is that this idea is intuitively ludicrous. Unfortunately pop culture got hold of it and now, well, "Ooh quantum stuff, put cats everywhere" ... On the other hand, Greg Egan did a couple of short stories about what if the underlying mathematics (which necessarily governs our universe) is altered when we "discover" weird things about it and this binds us to other universes sharing that mathematics, so we can't go there, and they can't come here, but if they discover something weird about the relationship between Pi and set theory that becomes true here even though we haven't "discovered" that, and if they can choose to discover something different, that is true instead.
- throw310822 3y agoYes it's definitely an idea that can be found here and there in Greg Egan's novels and short stories. Among other places, towards the end of Permutation City when it's suggested that the world beliefs of the inhabitants of Permutation City (humans vs evolved artificial species) are themselves shaping its reality.
- robinduckett 3y agoPage not found?
- asicsp 3y agoI see this: >The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter" There's also a link to press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/press-release/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/press-release...
- belter 3y agoPage is up - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/summary/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/summary/
- mdisc0rd 3y agoCan someone ELI5 what exactly they discovered?
- dagw 3y agoA way to turn a light on and off really really fast. If you want an ELI13-and-paid-attention-in-science-class then this covers it pretty well https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicsprize2023.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicspr...
- solarist 3y agoLike, realy realy realy fast, one billionth of one billionth of a second.
- wiz21c 3y agowhat is it useful for ? (honnest question)
- solarist 3y agoIt's like using flash when photographing, with these ultra short pulses one could see how electrons move inside atoms and molecules.
- dagw 3y agoYou know how strobe light photography lets you 'freeze' very fast moving things so you can study what they look like mid motion. This is used for basically that, except for much much smaller things moving much much faster.
- drt5b7j 3y ago> The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter"
- jahnu 3y agoFor reference: > Attosecond pulses: Flashes of light that last only a few billionths of a billionth of a second. In one attosecond, light covers a distance of 0.3 nanometers (one nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter). This corresponds to the diameter of a water molecule. > Femtosecond pulses: Flashes of light that last one millionth of a billionth of a second – about one thousand times longer than attopulses. https://www.mpg.de/9298413/F002_focus_024-031.pdf https://www.mpg.de/9298413/F002_focus_024-031.pdf
- solarist 3y agoL’Huillier, who became the fifth woman to win the physics prize, was teaching when she received the call from the committee, having the advantage of being in the same time zone as the committee. (On a side note, Bing chat already knows now that she won the prize. Color me impressed.)
- scandinavian 3y ago> (On a side note, Bing chat already knows now that she won the prize. Color me impressed.) It actually doesn't. Bing searches for your query and uses plain old search results as extra context for the actual LLM. GPT-4 still has the same knowledge cutoff as when the model was last trained. Here's what it feeds to the model when searching for "nobel prize in physics 2023": https://pastebin.com/raw/MhW4EmTx https://pastebin.com/raw/MhW4EmTx
- mambru 3y agoHow are you getting this? I is it visible to the browser (client)?
- scandinavian 3y agoYes, there's a websocket that contains all bing chat communication.
- saliagato 3y agowhich?
- scandinavian 3y agowss://sydney.bing.com/sydney/ChatHub This is using Chrome.
- tpmx 3y agoPhoto from that lecture at Lund University, Sweden: https://twitter.com/lantisfjantis/status/1709146065985777767 https://twitter.com/lantisfjantis/status/1709146065985777767 This year's Nobel laureate in physics lectures us after (!!) being notified of her win!!
- gary_0 3y agoI found some details about the prizewinning research here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferenc_Krausz#Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferenc_Krausz#Research
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thrownawaysz 3y agoHungary 2 in 2 so far
- Majestic121 3y agoThere is something about Hungary and extremely smart people : https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
- ahoka 3y agoJust have to leave the country to be successful, or worse, to not get killed by the same people what will be the first to boast about your achievements abroad.
- ovi256 3y agoSome people are proud of where other people were born, regardless of where these other people work. Some people are proud of where other people work, regardless of where these other people were born. These are very different views of the world /shrug
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 3y agoThe language and the misery? :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Beijinger 3y agoWell, what do you expect? In his novel Budapest, the Brazilian novelist Chico Buarque writes that Hungarian “is rumored to be the only tongue in the world the devil respects.”
- j7ake 3y agoAnybody know why Paul Corkum did not get awarded? He won wolf prize along with Krausz and L’Huillier last year.
- inglor_cz 3y agoIIRC Nobels can only have three or fewer laureates per year.
- noobermin 3y agoThere is some nice sweet irony here. Very marginal inside baseball. I know of one of the recipients although indirectly. I felt like their group was kept around their university physics dept because they were known to be good in that field, while generally their colleagues were generally not respected as their physics (which was derisively deemed "AMO" as if it were an epithet) was not seen as "fundamental" enough by the particle physics people who held high administrative positions in the department. Fast forward a few years, and first Gerard Morou and Donna Strickland and Authur Ashkin got the Nobel for CPA and optical trapping, and now we have a nobel for research into attosecond physics. There was a nobel prize for the Higgs, but SUSY and all the other sorts of things particle physicists hinged on...well that didn't peter out, did it?
- pyb 3y agoSurprising/doubtful, never heard of AMO physics being marginalised anywhere.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- casparvitch 3y agoI can vouch, I'm in a heavily particle/astro dominated dept and AMO is looked down upon.
- urthor 3y agoAcademic politics is something else. I thought for awhile those guys got lucky and skip office politics. Then I realize that PhD level IQs + pressure to get into the fancy journals means that the politics is 古典小說 tier.
- daniel-s 3y agoThe Chinese translates to, "classical novels," according to Google.
- 3y ago
- HerculePoirot 3y ago> Prize share: 1/3 (x 3) Can someone elaborate on these weights ? Are there occurrences where the attribution weights are different between laureates ?
- nuccy 3y agoYes, if a Nobel prize is given for two different topics (for three people, first person - one topic, other two - another topic) then 1/2, 1/4, 1/4 shares will be assigned, for example the prize in physics in 2019 [1]. 1. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2019/summary/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2019/summary/
- ivh 3y agoYes, it can also be split 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/4, e.g. when two competing efforts are recognized, one of which was two people. The rule that at most three people can share the pize can make this awkward.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- daoboy 3y agoAn attosecond is to a second what a second is to the age of the universe.
- Gooblebrai 3y agoNeat! This comparison makes easier to understand the magnitude.
- matsemann 3y agoI really enjoy the accompanied "Popular science background"-paper the Nobel Committee releases together with the awards. It's linked on the page, but a direct link that explains the contributions of this award is here: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicsprize2023.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicspr...
- sidcool 3y agoHow the hell do they do it! I can't even reduce 100 ms latency from my API calls.
- jbird11 3y agoI found these illustrations to be really informative Experimental setup - https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/fig5_fy_en_23.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/fig5_fy_en_23.pdf Light / gas interaction - https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/fig4_fy_en_23.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/fig4_fy_en_23.pdf
- apienx 3y agoSwedish paper reported that L’Huillier was lecturing when the announcement took place, and just proceeded with the lesson as if nothing happened. Kept their cool! https://www.dn.se/sverige/nobelpristagaren-anne-l-huillier-fortsatte-forelasa-som-om-inget-hade-hant/ https://www.dn.se/sverige/nobelpristagaren-anne-l-huillier-f...
- bradrn 3y agoAlso commented on at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37749891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37749891.
- bjornsing 3y agoJust had a call with an old classmate that works in the same department (and even same division). He recounted another fun anecdote: The PhD students in the department had set up a room to watch the Nobel committee’s press conference as usual. They were pleasantly surprised when their professor started talking from the room next door. So she kept her cool to the very end. :)
- appleaday1 3y agoThis is amazing :)
- kaycebasques 3y agoThe popular science background that the Nobel organization produced is a readable explanation: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicsprize2023.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/popular-physicspr...
- amelius 3y agoIf the pulses are so short, would it be possible to create an EUV light source from this technology?
- fsh 3y agoLithography requires the highest possible average intensity, while the pulse length is irrelevant. The laser-driven tin plasma sources used in EUV lithography produce around 7 orders of magnitude more power than the most powerful sources based on high harmonic generation.
- amelius 3y ago> while the pulse length is irrelevant I was thinking along the lines of: 1 attosecond corresponds to .3nm, so very short wavelength, so very deep UV.
- gumby 3y agoSomehow I had this brief image of some ancient, stooped and heavily wrinkled codger being interviewed by the BBC seemingly interrupted while working in the field: "Another Nobel for the study of the electron? That tiny lepton? In this day and age? They should encourage people to work on quantum gravity." I actually think this work is cool so I can't explain that passing image. Sometimes our brains are weird.
- RantyDave 3y agoSo, and I'm feeling a bit stupid here, not visible light? Because the pulse must be a complete wave, right? It goes from not being there, to being there, to not being there. And "a few dozen attoseconds" is very much shorter than the wave period of visible light. These flashes are low end x-rays?