This Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics to the French physicists Anne L'Huillier and Pierre Agostini and the Hungarian Ferenc Krausz, fathers of new tools to explore the world of electrons within the atoms. The jury highlighted that the three winners are responsible for a new way of creating extremely short pulses of light, which can be used to measure or to photograph the fleeting processes in which electrons move or change energies. They are events that occur in attoseconds, trillionths of a second: the shortest time scale captured by humans. Anne L'Huillier, professor at Lund University (Sweden), is the fifth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics since 1901. The award is worth 11 million Swedish crowns, about 950,000 euros.
