NOVOSIBIRSK, October 5Russian scientists have made a significant contribution to research on ultrashort light pulses, for which the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded, Alexander Apolonsky, a senior researcher at the Institute of Automation and Electrometry SB RAS (IA&E SB RAS), told reporters.
Apolonsky worked for about 20 years together with one of the Nobel Prize winners in physics, Ferenc Kraus, first in Hungary and then at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching (Germany). Kraus, together with a team of scientists, generated and measured the first attosecond light pulse and used it to observe the behavior of electrons in atoms, thereby giving birth to a new field of physics — attophysics.
“I want to say that there is a strong Russian trace in this Nobel Prize. This is, firstly, the generation of high harmonics of light – Crainov and Delaunay, and the ionization of Keldysh atoms,” the scientist said, noting that almost every work on attosecond physics refers to a 1965 work by Russian researcher Leonid Keldysh.
Apolonsky noted the decisive role of Nobel laureate Ferenc Kraus in the formation of the attosecond topic. He believes that Kraus's contribution to the Nobel Prize compared to other laureates is conditionally 60%. The scientist said that in full format the scientific topic of the physics of ultrashort light pulses is “unaffordable” in Russia.
“It is so complex and so expensive that, from my point of view, it is simply unaffordable. The only group that is more or less somewhere close is the group of Alexei Zheltikov from Moscow State University,” he said. According to the scientist, in the long term, the use of attosecond light pulses will allow people to control chemical reactions at the atomic level and create new high-performance light electronics devices.
The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to French-American Pierre Agostini, Hungarian-Austrian scientist Ferenc Kraus and Frenchwoman Anne L'Huillier for «experimental methods that produce attosecond pulses of light to study the motion of electrons in matter.» Nobel Prize winners in physics managed to obtain ultrashort light pulses measured in attoseconds.