2018 Physics Nobel honours three optics visionaries

04 Oct 2018 James Dacey

This episode of Physics World Weekly has a laser focus on one thing: the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics. On Tuesday, Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland joined the pantheon of Nobel laureates for their “groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics”. Ashkin scooped half the prize for his work on “optical tweezers and their application to biological systems”. While Mourou and Strickland share the other half “for their method of generating high-intensity ultrashort optical pulses”.

Physics World’s general physics editor Hamish Johnston is in conversation with multimedia editor James Dacey about the prize. Of course, one of the notable aspects of this year’s prize is that Donna Strickland is the first woman to win a physics Nobel for 55 years. Regrettably, Strickland is only the third woman in history to win the prize, after Marie Curie (1903) and Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963). Strickland features in the podcast, in a phone conversation with the media shortly after the prize announcement (audio courtesy of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences).

At the end of the podcast, Dacey also gives a round-up of the other news stories from this week. That includes CERN’s decision to suspend the Italian theoretical physicist Alessandro Strumia, pending an investigation into Strumia’s controversial presentation at an inaugural CERN workshop on high-energy theory and gender.

If you enjoy the podcast, then you can subscribe via the Apple podcast app or your chosen podcast host.

James Dacey is multimedia projects editor, Physics World

8/10/2018 FROM PHYSICSWORLD.COM