The awardees, says the committee, “have shown how to observe and control the motion of electrons in atoms, molecules, and solids with ultrashort light pulses on time scales of about one hundred attoseconds. One attosecond is approximately the time for light to travel across an atom and is the natural scale for electronic motion in matter. This time scale was previously inaccessible to experimental studies due to the lack of light pulses with short enough duration.”

Thanks to attophysics, scientists can now directly observe natural processes that were once off-limits to the human eye. “It is a huge step to know that what we can imagine theoretically can now be tested experimentally. This interplay between experiment and theory is inspiring a lot of ideas,” remarked committee chairman Theodor W. Hänsch, Director of the Laser Spectroscopy Division at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Germany) and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Attophysics, says laureate Paul Corkum, “is about making the fastest measurements that we as humans can make. And that, I think, is what places it at the forefront of knowledge.” An attosecond, he explains, “is incredibly short. So an attosecond is to a second as a second is to the age of the universe. Can you imagine something as short as that?” In figures, an attosecond is one billionth of a billionth of a second, that is, 0.000000000000000001 seconds.

“That’s the time scale for the movement of electrons across all the atoms matter is composed of, including our own bodies,” adds Fernando Martín, Professor of Physical Chemistry at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Scientific Director of IMDEA Nanociencia and one of the nominators of the three awardees. “So to achieve real-time imaging of electron motion in matter, we needed a technology that would give us access to that time scale. And that is precisely what these researchers have achieved.”

An ultrafast “camera” to “film” electrons in motion

Interview with Paul Corkum

The tools developed by L’Huillier, Corkum, and Krausz act like a camera with a shutter time so dizzyingly ultrafast that it can capture the movement of a hydrogen atom electron that takes 150 attoseconds to circle the nucleus.

Prof. Martín elaborates on this example: “If you want to film how a car moves, you have to take snapshots at very close intervals, so the movement registers.”

“If you take photos with an exposure time of one minute, say, by the time you press the shutter the car has gone and all you have is a blurred image at best. In other words, to visualize an object, you need to take snapshots at intervals and with a duration far shorter than the time that object takes to move significantly. This is what the three laureates have done on the time scale of electron motion, thanks to light pulses generated with ultrafast lasers that emit for just a few attoseconds.”

Attophysics techniques not only mean that we can now capture the movement of electrons, they have also conjured the possibility of manipulating these subatomic particles. “Once you have gained the ability to visualize this movement in real time,” says Martín, “you can likely use the same light sources to manipulate it, eventually modifying its behavior and properties, with applications in multiple domains from biomedicine and electronics to the search for new clean energy sources.”

The committee’s citation ends with a similar reflection: “These groundbreaking contributions have opened exciting new frontiers in different areas, including atomic physics, photochemistry, and materials science.”

The findings that sowed the seeds of attophysics

Interview with Anne L'Huillier

In 1987, Anne L’Huillier made a discovery that laid the groundwork of the attophysics field. When working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre near Paris, she became intrigued by the question of what would happen if atoms were subjected to short, intense laser pulses of infrared light. She expected to see fluorescent light, but was surprised to find that the atoms appeared to be emitting light waves at very high frequencies, that is, extremely high-energy X-rays.

L’Huillier had achieved the highest frequency ever recorded through the interaction of laser light pulses with matter. “It was truly fascinating; the first step toward generating an attosecond pulse. And I have never stopped working in the field, contributing to different aspects of the body of research.”

Retracing her steps, the scientist realized that the laser was acting on the atoms the way waves act on seaweed on a rock. Each time a wave comes in, the seaweed unfurls to its full extent, only to retract when the wave recedes. The seaweed, in other words, moves up and down in time with the waves. In similar fashion, the arrival of a laser pulse pulls away the electrons surrounding the atom, which then resume their initial position when the pulse stops. It was on the way back, it turned out, that the electrons emitted those high-frequency light waves.

The seaweed metaphor was originally devised by Paul Corkum on the basis of L’Huillier’s reconstruction. As well as coming up with an intuitive visualization of the phenomenon, he decided to study it from a theoretical standpoint, developing a model that mathematically described the interaction between laser and atoms. It was L’Huillier’s discovery and Corkum’s theoretical model that sowed the seeds of today’s attophysics.

The shortest light pulses in the history of science

Interview with Ferenc Krausz

While visiting Vienna in the 1990s, Corkum met Ferenc Krausz, then studying there as a young postdoc. “Corkum inspired me with his concepts like no one else,” Krausz recalls today. “What I took from them was that there might be a way to move forward into a time domain that was completely inaccessible beforehand, and render extremely fast processes observable.”

Corkum and Krausz were familiar with L’Huillier’s work and quickly agreed that it could hold the key to generating the shortest light flashes ever. They were aware that, in general, short light pulses were the vehicle to access and observe the universe of the small. Indeed with pulses just a little longer than those they were aiming for, scientists had already managed to glimpse the movement of atoms within molecules.

“The idea is the same as when you capture the motion of a Formula 1 car or a bullet. You take a series of snapshots and then reconstruct how the bullet actually hits the wall,” Krausz explains. These snapshots can then be reproduced in slow motion to see the movement in all its detail.

But they wanted to take this idea of ultrafast photography even further, and apply it to tracing the movement of electrons. These minuscule particles move up to a thousand times faster than atoms, so would require much shorter light pulses than were possible at the time. What was needed was to descend to the attosecond scale.

The light waves generated by L’Huillier seemed the ideal candidate for the task, as they oscillated at such high frequencies that they emitted light pulses of a few attoseconds duration.

The challenge didn’t end there, however. The pulses were short, certainly, but they followed each other in quick succession. And for them to perform in the style of an ultrafast camera, they would have to be isolated into individual light flashes and emitted one by one.

Krausz describes it thus: “Having a whole train of pulses is still something like having a camera that has a very high shutter speed. But it doesn’t open the shutter just once, it opens and closes the shutter all the time, which is, in many cases, not very helpful. You want to be able to open the shutter once and close it very quickly, to take just one snapshot. This is also true when we try to actually capture microscopic processes.”

The solution they came up with was simple but effective. They decided to go as far as possible in shortening the initial infrared pulse (the wave hitting the rock), so the electron (the seaweed) would rise and fall just once, and by doing so obtained a single light pulse lasting around one hundred attoseconds.

This experiment, published in 2001, marked what Krausz describes as “the birthday of experimental attophysics.” As well as opening the door to detailed observation of electron motion, it was able to corroborate a series of predictions formulated decades back by theoretical physics which had previously been inaccessible to testing in the lab.

One of these predictions is the so-called tunnel effect, a phenomenon predicted by quantum physics whereby an electron is able to pass through a barrier which, in theory, it does not have the energy to surmount. Although there was some evidence that the tunnel effect existed in nature, it had never yielded to real-time observation. Now, thanks to Corkum and Krausz’s technique, building on L’Huillier’s discovery, it could be seen on “film” for the first time.

In search of applications in fields like electronics and biomedicine

Now that attosecond physics has revealed its unquestionable potential, the awardees wish to use it to delve deeper into the mysteries of the matter all nature is made of, and to develop applications in fields such as electronics or biomedicine.

“This field of research is exploding in every direction,” says L’Huillier. “I have had the privilege to be there from the beginning, so I have seen the ideas grow and been able to follow the main steps in the process.” Asked about its future, she ventures that “it will split into different subfields,” as has occurred with other lines of research close to her own.

For this scientist, the next goal is to move towards the sphere of quantum information science. She is currently studying ways to probe more closely into processes like entanglement, one of the most surprising features of quantum mechanics whereby two separate particles, perhaps even kilometers apart, display a shared behavior that cannot be accounted for by classical physics. Arriving at as close as possible an understanding of this phenomenon could do much to hasten the advancement of quantum technologies, although L’Huillier’s motivation is not of an immediately practical nature: “This is a new aspect which I am very excited about, though I have no idea where it will go.”

Another concern is the highly specialized nature of the lasers used to generate attosecond pulses, and she is currently pondering ways to achieve the same effect using more widespread, commercially available lasers. “I think they are going to be very, very useful for more standard, maybe even industrial applications.”

Corkum, meantime, has been using attosecond pulses generated not by single atoms but by sets of atoms of semiconductors such as silicon. Semiconductors are at the heart of modern electronics, and the scientist believes that combining all previous knowledge of these materials with the new possibility of having them emit attosecond pulses is “a very powerful technology.”

Krausz too believes that attophysics can drive a new revolution in computing: “Electrons play an extremely important role in nanocircuits, they are responsible for switching the electric current on and off and thus processing information at ever higher speeds. If we want to speed up signal processing to build ever more powerful computers, again, we have to understand how electrons move in these tiny dimensions. And in doing so, we have the opportunity to advance electronic signal processing to its ultimate limit.”

He has also been exploring the potential of attosecond pulses in the detection of disease. If we remove all the cells from a blood sample, he explains, the fluid we are left with is the blood plasma or serum (depending on the treatment). The molecules it contains provide valuable cues to the donor’s health status, and the scientist is studying ways to use attosecond pulses to extract this information.

“Using incredibly sensitive measurements, we can analyze these molecules with great precision,” he explains. “And in our preliminary studies, we have been able to detect eight different types of cancers with an excellent efficiency. We have also detected one type of a very severe coronary disease, pre-diabetes, diabetes, and stroke.” These measurements, he believes, could prove game-changing in future for the early diagnosis of multiple conditions.

Results are now being subjected to testing in 10,000 individuals as part of a multi-year clinical trial, and Krausz’s hope is that the system may be operative within the next ten years.

Nominators

Anne L’Huillier, Paul Corkum, and Ferenc Krausz were put forward for the award by Stephen Leone, John R. Thomas Endowed Chair in Physical Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley (United States); Fernando Martín, Professor of Physical Chemistry at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Scientific Director of the Severo Ochoa project at IMDEA Nanociencia (Spain); and Pascal Salières, Head of the Attophysics Group at CEA Paris-Saclay (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission), France.

Laureate bio notes

Anne L’Huillier (Paris, France, 1958), of French-Swedish nationality, obtained a double master’s degree in physics and mathematics in 1979, and went on to receive her PhD in Physical Sciences from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris in 1986. She completed her doctoral studies at what is now known as the Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA), a public research organization where she held a permanent research position from 1986 to 1995, combining her work there with postdoc stays at Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg), the University of Southern California (Los Angeles) and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore). In 1995 he joined the faculty at Lund University, where she has been Professor of Atomic Physics since 1997. Leader of eight EU-funded projects since 1993, she was a Member of the Nobel Committee for Physics from 2010 to 2015.

Paul Corkum (Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, 1943) completed a PhD in Physics at Lehigh University (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, United States) in 1972. In 1973 he joined the National Research Council of Canada (CNRC), where now, half a century on, he heads the Joint Attosecond Science Laboratory, a partnership between the CNRC and the University of Ottawa, where he is a Distinguished University Professor. He is also Co-Director of the Joint Centre for Extreme Photonics at the University of Ottawa and holds academic positions at Texas A&M University and the University of New Mexico. Author of over 360 articles in scientific journals with more than 47,000 citations, he serves or has served as an advisor to the U.S. National Research Council, the European Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK).

Ferenc Krausz (Mór, Hungary, 1962), of Hungarian-Austrian nationality, completed two degree courses simultaneously between 1981 and 1985, in electrical engineering at Budapest University of Technology and in theoretical physics at Eötvös Loránd University, also in the Hungarian capital. Shortly after, he moved to Austria and obtained his PhD in Laser Physics from Vienna University of Technology (1991), where he would go on to become a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering (1999-2004). He is currently Professor of Experimental Physics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (since 2004) and one of five directors at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (since 2003). Krausz is also Scientific Director at the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting in Budapest, as well as heading the Centre for Advanced Laser Applications and the Laboratory for Extreme Photonics, both of them in Munich.

Basic Sciences committee and evaluation support panel

The committee in this category was chaired by Theodor Hänsch, Director of the Division of Laser Spectroscopy at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Germany) and the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Physics, with Hongkun Park, Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics at Harvard University (United States), acting as secretary. Remaining members were Emmanuel Candès, Barnum-Simons Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University (United States), María José García Borge, Research Professor at the Institute of the Structure of Matter (IEM), CSIC (Spain), Nigel Hitchin, Emeritus Savilian Professor of Geometry in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom), Aitziber López Cortajarena, Ikerbasque Research Professor, Scientific Director and Biomolecular Nanotechnology Group Leader at CIC biomaGUNE, Center for Cooperative Research in Biomaterials (Spain), Martin Quack, Head of the Molecular Kinetics and Spectroscopy Group in the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry at ETH Zurich (Switzerland), and Sandip Tiwari, Charles N. Mellowes Professor in Engineering, Emeritus at Cornell University (United States) and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (India).

The evaluation support panel charged with nominee pre-assessment was organized into three groups. The Physics Group was coordinated by Marisol Martín González, Scientific Researcher at the Institute of Micro and Nanotechnology (INM-CNM, CSIC) and formed by Alberto Casas González, Research Professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (IFT, CSIC-UAM); Alfonso Cebollada Navarro, Research Professor at the Institute of Micro and Nanotechnology (IMN-CNM, CSIC); Lourdes Fábrega Sánchez, Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB, CSIC); and Alejandro Luque Estepa, Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA, CSIC). The Chemistry Group was coordinated by José M. Mato, General Director of CIC bioGUNE and CIC biomaGUNE, and formed by Miguel Ángel Bañares González, Research Professor in the Institute of Catalysis and Petrochemistry (ICP, CSIC); Ethel Eljarrat Essebag, Scientific Researcher at the Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDAEA, CSIC); Francisco García Labiano, Deputy Coordinator of the MATERIA Global Area and Scientific Researcher at the Institute of Carbochemistry (ICB, CSIC); Jesús Jiménez-Barbero, Scientific Director of CIC bioGUNE and Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Chemical Glycobiology Lab; Gonzalo Jiménez-Osés, Principal Investigator in the Computational Chemistry Lab at CIC bioGUNE; Luis Liz-Marzán, Principal Investigator in the Bionanoplasmonics Lab at CIC biomaGUNE; Aitziber López Cortajarena, Ikerbasque Research Professor, Scientific Director and Principal Investigator in the Biomolecular Nanotechnology Lab at CIC biomaGUNE; and María Luz Sanz Murias, Scientific Researcher at the Institute of General Organic Chemistry (IQOG, CSIC). The Mathematics Group was coordinated by José María Martell Berrocal, CSIC Vice-President for Scientific and Technical Research, and formed by María Jesús Carro Rosell, Professor of Mathematical Analysis at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid; Alberto Enciso Carrasco, Research Professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (ICMAT, CSIC); Elisenda Feliú, Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark); and Francisco Martín Serrano, Professor in the Department of Geometry and Topology at the University of Granada.

About the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards

The BBVA Foundation centers its activity on the promotion of world-class scientific research and cultural creation, and the recognition of talent.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, funded with 400,000 euros in each of their eight categories, recognize and reward contributions of singular impact in physics and chemistry, mathematics, biology and biomedicine, technology, environmental sciences (climate change, ecology and conservation biology), economics, social sciences, the humanities and music, privileging those that significantly enlarge the stock of knowledge in a discipline, open up new fields, or build bridges between disciplinary areas. The goal of the awards, established in 2008, is to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a public good without frontiers, the best instrument to take on the great global challenges of our time and expand the worldviews of individuals for the benefit of all humanity. Their eight categories address the knowledge map of the 21st century.

The BBVA Foundation has been aided in the evaluation of nominees for the Frontiers Award in Basic Sciences by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the country’s premier public research organization. CSIC has a preferential role in the appointment of members to the evaluation support panels made up of leading experts in the corresponding knowledge area, who are charged with undertaking an initial assessment of the candidates proposed by numerous institutions across the world, and drawing up a reasoned shortlist for the consideration of the award committees. CSIC is also responsible for designating each committee’s chair and participates in the selection of remaining members, thus helping to ensure objectivity in the recognition of scientific excellence.