Laser Achievements Capture 2018 Nobel Physics Prize

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics has recognized “groundbreaking inventions in laser physics” during the 1970s and 1980s that set up decades of subsequent scientific advances.

Half of the prize has gone to OSA Honorary Member Arthur Ashkin of Bell Laboratories, USA, for his discovery and advancement of techniques using laser-based optical tweezers to capture, move and measure forces on small objects. The other half is shared by OSA Fellow Gérard Mourou of the École Polytechnique, France, and OSA Fellow and 2013 OSA President Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo, Canada, for their invention of chirped-pulse amplification (CPA), the technique that has underlain vast advances in the power of ultrafast pulsed lasers since 1985.

The selection of Strickland made her the first female Nobel physics laureate in more than 50 years, and only the third female physics laureate in the prize’s history.