The winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics have just been announced, and once again it is a fascinating area of research that I think most people would not have thought about as a potential candidate for the top prize in science, but which is very worthy of this recognition and reward.

This year's award was given to to French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier, French scientist Pierre Agostini and Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz for their extensive research on the dynamics of electrons, and has the potential to affect everything from fundamental chemistry and quantum physics research to the next generation of electonics technology.

Although we have been studying the physics and phenomenology of electrons for over a century, they are difficult to observe and study directly. Electrons move very fast, and due to the effect of quantum mechanics we also know that they exist more as a nebulous cloud than a specific particle located at a specific point. This makes them different to isolate in experiments, but the advance made by these three scientists (and obviously many others who were not recognized in this award) was to use very short laser bursts to conduct measurements over tiny fractions of a second.

In this case, the time periods of interest were in the attosecond range. (For those not familiar with this notation, it represents 0.0000000000000000001 seconds. Another explanation is that if you divide a second into a thousand parts you have a millisecond, and one thousandth of that is a microsecond. Do that process six times, and you have attosecond, the time scale of interest here.).

In order to study this short time periods, scientists had to work with very short, intense pulses of laser light, a technology was first developed in 2001. By bombarding electrons with these high intensity pulses, and then studying the light that reflects or passes through the electrons, researchers were able to effectively take a very fast 'photograph' of the fast moving electrons. The resulting 'image' is still quite blurry due to the high speeds of the electrons, and due to quantum effects, but it is still a significant advance in the study of subatomic systems such as these.

And as mentioned before, all advances in our understanding of electron physics can have significant and unforeseen effects on a wide range of technologies, from chemical reactions (which are based entirely on electron exchange and interactions) to the next generation of electronics (which is also based entirely on the physics of electrons).

So while this might seem quite disconnected from our everyday life, it will likely have a major influence on the way technology advances in the coming decades. As so often happens with fundamental research, we can only imagine how this revolutionary research will change our world.

Congratulations to these three scientists for their well deserved win of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics!