The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018: Popular Information

INTRODUCTION

In the last blog, I introduced popular information about physics in 2018, in this blog, I'm going to write about popular information about physics in 2018. This is the link to what I want to write https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/10/popular-physicsprize2018.pdf

The prize reasons for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 are for the "optical tweezers and their application to biological systems" (ARTHUR ASHKIN) and "for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses"(GÉRARD MOUROU and DONNA STRICKLAND). To say in the field of physics, their research field is OPTICS.

ARTHUR ASHKIN's Achievement

Simply speaking, his achievement is to invent optical tweezers that the method of holding very small materials such as ranging from in size atoms and molecules to viruses and cells. Sun Ray carries enormous energy to the earth, in the age of just inventing laser beams, some people started thinking about whether it would be possible to move some objects to use laser beams. Ashkin, one of the people that thought it, began to experiment with the new instrument at Bell laboratories outside New York. he used a laser that went straight in one direction, didn't expand all directions. Ashkin got two surprising results: when he hit the laser beams to a small particle, this particle started to move and was drawn towards the center of the beams that were the highest intensity sphere. The force of drawing towards the center is called gradient force. There were several difficulties and accidents observing atoms and viruses snd so on, he'd finally made it practical. In detail, when we use laser beams to observe atoms he invented that atoms couldn't escape by their heat vibrations and when we want to observe cells and proteins, he invented the technic that didn't break it. Since he had invented important methods, a lot of breakthroughs had occurred in many fields.

GÉRARD MOUROU and DONNA STRICKLAND's Achievement

I wrote laser pulse above, what laser pulse is? The answer is a laser that blinks repeatedly at short time intervals. A laser pulse is used in the wide fields but the energy and interval of a laser pulse were once small and long for practical situations. GÉRARD MOUROU and DONNA STRICKLAND invented the war of generating a high energy and very short interval laser pulse. I'll give you some examples of how a laser pulse is used in practice. First, when we want to investigate What happens between molecules and atoms. Second, when we want to make more efficient storage. Third, when we want to change some matter's properties and so on. the shortest laser pulse interval now is about one attosecond that is the unit of a billionth of a billionth of a second and equal to $10^{-18}$ second, and this shortest laser pulse enables us to observe properties of electrons.