Faster Than We Thought Possible - Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 Explained

The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2023 has been awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier for for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter. In this video I discuss the physics behind this prize and why it is so significant.
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[@adamkelly2256]

Thank you for taking the time to underscore the importance of fundamental research. I'm sure this year's winners are on board with you!

[@ScienceDiscussed]

I think most scientists are.

[@qfurgie]

i love this guy is explaining insane scientific concepts to me while there’s Goku going Super Saiyan in the background

[@JosephThiebes]

The 2018 physics Nobel was not awarded for the creation of femtosecond pulses. That effort was awarded in 1999 to Ahmed Zewail. The 2018 prize was for optical tweezers and chirped pulse amplification, which make use of femtosecond pulses that were in widespread use by then.

[@MrSanbonsakura]

This Goku on the side gives you a lot of strength.

[@psy-v]

I love how Goku is just chilling in the background while you're discussing something as serious as the nobel prize.

[@riccello]

Shining a light through noble gas produced a Nobel Prize.

[@hpwilliams0]

Anne’s students applauding her as she leaves her classroom is so fucking heartwarming ❤️

[@mk1st]

Her reaction to winning reminds me of a joke I heard years ago. “How can you identify a Norwegian extrovert?” “He’s the one staring at YOUR shoes”

[@johnh539]

Well deserved Nobel Prize. I applaud you for an excellent explanation and for your advocating for Fundamental research, intellectual justification not potencial profit motivation. PS new subscriber.

[@ScienceDiscussed]

Thanks, I am glad you liked it and welcome.

[@luiz00estilo]

Even ignoring all of the very impactful applications, just the idea of imaging an electron sounds _really_ cool.

[@Ichibuns]

Could you imagine how much ridiculously fast data storage is going to be required to film something as fast as an electron? Do we have the data speeds available to do it? I'm excited to see how many new discoveries this will lead too. On the other side of that coin. The brute force method of breaking encryptions might become a viable option soon. We're going to need some much bigger prime numbers

[@CLSHR]

Brute force method of hackers finding all of my passwords lol

[@ticketforlife2103]

There are encryption methods called vector encryption.

[@milokiss8276]

Holy hell. You’re telling me I can see an image of an electron in my lifetime? That’s actually huge.

[@rnnyhoff]

Bravo! Well done ... you've increased the awareness of attosecond technology, well below a trillion-fold, but you added to my knowledge of this incredible advance in the science of electron motion. It's certain to have myriad applications to future development in all fields.

[@MrHuntingClaw]

Well, I hope it helps in advancing the science to such a degree, that people stop perceiving an electron's movement as if it's some sort schrodinger's cat, simply because of ya don't have a good enough camera.

[@brianhay4024]

I don't get it. Wouldn't sending a single photon be the shortest possible light burst? Wouldn't the shortest possible light pulse be a two-photon release at gamma-ray frequencies? I'm sure the answer is no because I'm a layman hack but those are the questions that come to mind.

[@ScienceDiscussed]

You can absolutely produce a single photon but that isn't that useful for imaging but does have a lot of other uses. In this case they can have a lot of photons that are all arriving at the same time.

[@netdragon256]

A single "photon" is a wave, not a particle (wave of probability) and the Heisenberg uncertainty principal is fully in effect and results are random. You only can image things when you have deterministic results, collapsing the waveform of both the electron and the photon. Note that this does change state - it isn't passive.

[@dekippiesip]

​@@ScienceDiscussed how do we interpret the concept of 'shortest light burst'. Does it refer to the time between one photon arriving and the next?

[@ScienceDiscussed]

I was referring to the pulse width rather than the time in between. Both parameters matter and both can be tuned by various means.

[@Solscapes.]

There are a lot of questions about the reproducibility and/or interpretations of a lot of capitalist-influenced science. Light seems to be a major one. Every "single photon" emitter I've read about, it turns out, sends "packets" of photons, but they call them single photon emitters, I think, because it fits the narrative of the physics' status quo, aka Dr. Whitten. My spelling might be off, but he's the author of M "Theory." He's why string "theory" (hypothesis, not theory) became so prevalent and string hypothesists got into the upper echelons across physics departments nationwide. He also pushes for the big bang, ignoring gravity's effect on red shifting to make it look like the universe is expanding. I'm not saying it's not, but the behavior of popsci-influencers and the news around the topic is sus, and I *am* saying that a lot of scientists have ignored the scientific method and any variables that work against the narrative of their benefactors or their own preconcieved notions, i.e. "the chemical imballance theory" of depression, everything to do with anticholinergics, lead industry funded studies of lead's toxicity, and when scientists told us that cigarettes are good for you.

[@robinbrowne5419]

Thanks for the informative video. It's always great to hear about these breakthroughs which revolutionize physics and eventually end up heing part of our daily lives. This probably compares to the invention of the laser itself, the electron microscope (so we can see all those funny bug pictures :-), and the transistor and then the integrated circuit so we can watch videos like this on our phones. Thanks again, and you have a new subscriber. Cheers from Canada :-)

[@ScienceDiscussed]

Glad you enjoyed it! Always happy to have more Canadian on board.

[@idontwantahandlethough]

off topic, but electron microscopes make me SO HAPPY that bugs are small. Or that I'm big. They're literally monsters!

[@BradIsenbek]

These scientists are the people we should be celbrating. 🎉 Amazing stuff.

[@jmitterii2]

Nah, in the Corporate states we gotta worship cons like Musk and Bankrupt-Fried and Bloody Holmes and Bezos and millionaire who plays a billionaire on TV O'Leary, etc. etc. They're billionaires you know.... until they're not and their frauds fall apart of course.

[@ckwkta88]

Excited on the new things that we may discover, learn and use! Subbed!

[@brucea9871]

I can understand why attosecond light pulses would be needed to detect electrons. In a physics lecture I saw the professor said in the time it took to blink his eye, the molecules in his eye vibrated 10 billion times and for each molecular vibration the electrons oribted the nucleus a million times. So electrons are moving pretty fast, necessitating fast detection methods.

[@markd8004]

So clear and concise! Thank you for the video

[@aaronraycove9517]

So some of the best supercomputers today do roughly 10^18 calculations per second. One second is comprised of 10^18 attoseconds. If we can compute with light pulses, which we can, than adopting what this man figured out would make modern supercomputers look like what the Eniac looks like to us today. Truly amazing.

[@SuperJibulus]

One universe per second

[@josephgoldsborough9138]

amazing info, thank you! I'm truly excited for the things we will learn from this technology

[@ThereIsNoRoot]

Thanks for the explanation and keep making science videos!

[@ScienceDiscussed]

Thank you very much.

[@rhyzily5289]

I literally teared up when Anne was applauded by her class. But particularly because I was overcome with how insanely short the light pulse is and the thought of what looking at electron motion will mean for science! Great video! Thanks so much for sharing

[@TheBobcats12]

Love your content! Keep up the great work!

[@ScienceDiscussed]

Glad you enjoy it!

[@4seiken-594]

This is incredibly exciting and inspiring. I cant wait to see what this will do for scientific progress!

[@Milkydrummer]

Really enjoyed this video, thanks for sharing.

[@nyckhusan2634]

Attosecond or 10^-18 second is one step closer to a minimal bit of time, defined by Planck as 5.391X10^-44 second. It means we approached one step closer to the fundamental understanding how Universe works.

[@dmitrybavykin1606]

@@JonaasK to boldly go towards Planckoseconds = 10^-44sec.

[@lennyvlaminov9480]

Of course it deserves the Nobel Prize, absolutely amazing breakthrough.

[@stevendamon7309]

So, fastest strobe light ever so far. That will be useful in studying spin dynamics. A really fast timing light pulse.

[@werr3222werrr]

This is a great video, and love the promotion of fundamental research too

[@Womcataclysm]

My dad was colleague with this year's nobel prize as well as 2018's winner Gerard Mourou :D

[@bungalowjuice7225]

Good explanation. Nice voice. Thank you! 🎉

[@AshwinMaloo79]

Dhanyavad 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

[@WoolyCow]

great vid! do you know how those pulses are then able to be interpreted or collected with so little time between them?

[@hakiza-technologyltd.8198]

To bad for those so called noble prize Winners.... hahahaha .... they did not present any registration of electrons observed. Only words and graphical simulations... plus you can’t pretend or insinuate to have violated the Heinsberg principle of indeterminacy with zero empirical material evidence. Any scientist must wonder what the hell is the motivation behind this prize.

[@ScienceDiscussed]

It is a great question. I didn't look into what type of detectors they are using. But no detector will be able to be reset in that timeframe. So I would imagine that they send a pulse of light, detect it, reset the detector, and then send the next pulse of light.

[@ivansytsev2581]

@@ScienceDiscussed I am working in this field and we are normally doing the so-called pump-probe experiments. We send the attosecond pulses together with delayed infrared pulses (most often we just split the IR pulse before harmonic generation and take a small fraction of it to act as a probe) into matter and look at and detect the electrons ejected through a photoelectric effect. Then we vary the delay between the attosecond and IR fields very precisely, which in turn affects the properties of the ejected electrons. These electrons can convey a lot of information about the pulses themselves or the system that we study. (People often call it "taking a series of snapshots at different delays and thus making an electron movie".

[@ScienceDiscussed]

@@ivansytsev2581 thanks for sharing the details of your experiments. It sounds awesome.

[@mikesteffes9999]

What I didn’t hear anything about - did I miss it? - was who got the award for developing a detector for these wavelengths?

[@PascalxSome]

I love how our conciousness and senses register in the middle of every scale

[@dsdy1205]

I wonder how useful this will be for optical interferometry as well

[@GeoffryGifari]

Imaging how electrons move *in* a molecule? can we do this without disrupting the system too much/making the electrons fly off, like in the heisenberg microscope thought experiment?

[@GeoffryGifari]

can we finally measure the position and momentum one electron at a time?

[@ScienceDiscussed]

The measurement is still limited by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. So with the extra spatial information come at the cost of less momentum information

[@GeoffryGifari]

@@ScienceDiscussedhmmm... but maybe its still possible to "follow the trajectory" of one electron... hmmmm...

[@ScienceDiscussed]

Yes this is the idea, to follow the trajectory of one of the electrons around the molecule by taking snap shots in time as to where it was.

[@hakiza-technologyltd.8198]

To bad for those so called noble prize Winners.... hahahaha .... they did not present any registration of electrons observed. Only words and graphical simulations... plus you can’t pretend or insinuate to have violated the Heinsberg principle of indeterminacy with zero empirical material evidence. Any scientist must wonder what the hell is the motivation behind this prize.

[@PerfectYarn]

This is really cool and I'm excited to see what developments this leads to.

[@physicsbutawesome]

Bro, that video was out QUICK!

[@ScienceDiscussed]

Haha thanks. To be honest I had it done earlier but I wasn't happy with the thumbnail which delayed it by a couple of days.

[@jasperbh]

Prof. Strickland's Nobel Prize was for chirped pulse amplification, not for creating femtosecond pulses -- to clarify, short laser pulses were already a thing (though I'm not totally clear whether femtosecond laser pulses were achievable yet), but were limited in their potential because you couldn't increase the power without damaging your gain crystal or lengthening the pulse due to nonlinear effects. The CPA allowed you to take low-energy very short (for the time) pulses, and amplify them by orders of magnitude, enabling all kinds of new applications. I think they demonstrated this on picosecond pulses in the 1985 paper. Also, can we all stop saying "fast" pulses? It's light. The light coming out of these lasers travels at the same as the speed of light coming out of your computer screen right now. What makes this light so interesting is that it's very, erm... brief; unlike this rant.

[@TiagoPizoli]

Well explained! Thanks.

[@dskow2]

Seems like there will eventually be faster light pulse. What technical challenge is preventing that from happening now? What is next speed to look for that will unlock some profound area of study?

[@dcabrames]

These are excellent questions and I would like the answers. I have another question. how does these atosecond pulses compare to the plank length, the shortest length?

[@ScienceDiscussed]

Good question! The plank length or time is still much shorter. An attosecond is 10^-18 seconds while the plank time is 10^-44 seconds.

[@papiezguwniak]

I can plank for 1 minute.

[@TheYurubutugralb]

Is the spelling “plank” acceptable?

[@papiezguwniak]

@@TheYurubutugralb Planck is the correct from if you're referring to length

[@IloveElsaofArendelle]

That's amazing, we can now determine the Sn1 and Sn2 reactions, if they are what we're told in theory

[@Sadikidas]

Sir, by discovery of attoseconds or may something more tiny time in future may prove super position is no more in quantum world ?

[@theRationalElement]

The last bit, “fund fundamental research.” 👏

[@nwickstead]

It took me a while to get how awesome this is. You can potentially view neurons doing the stuff we don't know.yet

[@DwainDwight]

it's absolutely incredible. science is endlessly amazing. monster congrats.

[@Mic.vencer]

I wonder what the technological limit to measurement is? Similar to how the plank scale is the limit to probing nature for further information, what would be the equivalent to that for cameras/frame rates?

[@padraiggluck2980]

1 Planck time unit ~= 5.39056e-26 attoseconds

[@laszlozoltan5021]

excellent explanation- I may be wrong but I guess that gets us the world's most precise clock- I guess time remains continuous

[@ezequielgerstelbodoha9492]

First thing came to mind is fiber optic with higher bandwidth. What would be the limitations of applicability with this discovery?

[@cinemaipswich4636]

If we can measure the position of an electron, we cannot know its charge, its direction of travel, or whether it has "spin". Did we reach a new threshold in Quantum Physics/Mechanics/Chromo-dynamics? Can we now count or measure what happens to Leptons Bosons and Quarks.

[@denischen8196]

How many photons are in an attosecond pulse of light? Is it possible to generate a single photon?

[@alexanderschonfeld5879]

How do you know you have light imulses lasting only attoseconds? Don't you need a detector (like a photomultiplier tube) and amplifier with bandwidth (or rise and fall times) even faster than the signal they look at to know the shape/width of your light pulse? I know oscilloscopes can have GigaHz bandwidth, but I'm not aware of detectors that are that fast.

[@paulmakinson1965]

Wouldn't Heisenberg's uncertainty principle prohibit knowing where the electron is at the scale of atoms? My physics classes are way behind me, but I remember the strange shapes of electron orbitals around hydrogen, like spheres, donut, and hourglass shaped, they were just volumes of higher probability. We were told that an electron is just a three dimensional stationary wave.

[@unit0023]

the reduced planck constant is around 10^-34 Js, diameter of an atom is around 10^-9 meters, so you can still get very precise information about position and momentum at least theoretically, although I don’t know anything about the field so take that with a grain of salt ofc.

[@dont-want-no-wrench]

i'm uncertain about that paul

[@Antagon666]

How did they even measure that the pulses are that short? Or did they just compute the result from fourier frequencies ? How do we know that it even holds true in those conditions ?

[@atticuswalker8970]

Is an attosecond the same inside and outside of a gravity well.

[@GCKteamKrispy]

Bruh, she is so badass. Won a noble prize and back to giving her knowledge to students

[@konstantinrebrov675]

Please please please make more Physics videos!

[@GeoffryGifari]

how is short pulses different than just using lasers with shorter wavelength? and if one attosecond is the duration of one pulse, what about the time between pulses?

[@ScienceDiscussed]

The pulses that they showed back in 2001 were 250 as long and they could produce them in a train or as a single pulse.

[@GeoffryGifari]

@@ScienceDiscussedhmm... i was thinking about that camera frame analogy. even if a pulse was very short, if it took much longer between pulses we wouldn't really get that many frames...

[@ScienceDiscussed]

Yes this is true but you can see get a snapshot in time as to what is going on.

[@opws6330]

thank you!

[@ScienceDiscussed]

You're welcome!

[@Saki630]

man i've watched videos and read the same wikipedia article you did and still dont understand why you need light pulses shot out of a laser at 10^-18seconds. Dont you need a detector that can operate at that frequency? Are you saying that there is a detector which can operate at 10^-18 or 10^-19seconds that can also instantly switch on and off to record an impact from this laser pulse? What would you gain shining this light at something like water? how fast of a detector would you need to catch light standing still in a vacuum?

[@roshunepp]

Hmmm, we don't have processors on the femto level so how can atto seconds improve compute? I'd love to see an electron though!

[@MilanVVVVV]

Thank you so much for the explanation!

[@viperking6573]

Does this mean we can calculate the trajectory of the electrons? I thought it wasn't possible per quantum physics

[@jamesraymond1158]

I wish you could explain what an electron does in an attosecond right at the beginning of the video. After 3 minutes, I still don't know the answer or why this is worth a Nobel prize.

[@mahoneytechnologies657]

Yes it deserves a Nobel Prize in Physics! Finaly a Nobel Prize in Physics that is worthwhile, not another String Theory or Particle Physics ! No Theory Should receive a Nobel without Cocrete Prof by Measurement, Until they are proven by measurement they are just Conjecture! People can dream up Theories faster than the hard work of developing measrement Techniques!

[@user-ky5dy5hl4d]

This guy should be a mystery book out loud reader.

[@bodenebarker3019]

Well done Thank you !

[@anteeklund4159]

I can imagine this severely increasing the capacity of fiberoptic cables, too

[@dr.chimpanz.1324]

0:35 , i wasnt looking at my phone and for a solid second there i thought i was watching a shulkercraft video.

[@scott32714keiser]

i made a compression program 1000/1 ratio how would i hot about releasing it

[@BobBob-nr1zt]

This video's background music isn't loud enough nor distracting enough.

[@scottaye9999]

Amazing, I think there was a single sentence of explanation of the technique, lots of sentences about the sex of the prize winner, lots of sentences fantasizing about the possible outcomes using the technique, but 1 sentence explaining the technique.

[@colintabor5656]

is no one gonna talk about the potential that this discovery could lead to breaking the uncertainty principle that dictates an electron can only have either their position or their velocity known at any given moment, but never both simultaneously?

[@Mic.vencer]

Unfortunately that’s not what’s on the table concerning this breakthrough, that is fundamentally not possible, the more you try to prob for information the further nature will sensor information about it, that’s why quantum makes everyone’s lives harder. You can’t really break the uncertainty principle, you can only get closer so to speak, a zenos paradox

[@dennisgarber]

Oh, that's why KZbin rates my videos by the attoseconds watched! I was clueless before this video.

[@TheDuckofDoom.]

But a pulse of what exactly? the pulse is shorter than the wavelength of the photons as far as I have gathered. Nobody has implied that these are X-ray or gamma pulses and visible/UV frequency waves are on the order of femtosecond.(which was why the theory was that femto was the fastest)

[@MrPruske]

nice vid. you sit pretty still and look practiced, i recommend turning off the auto focus.

[@ScienceDiscussed]

Thanks for the tip

[@JohnDlugosz]

4:28 The stock footage is of the lens' *aperture* , not the shutter. These cameras have focal plane shutters, which _could_ be shown if you take off the lens, and I'm sure there is stock footage of it. You might have confused the aperture footage with that of a *leaf shutter* in action, which would also illustrate your point.

[@ScienceDiscussed]

Good spot. Clearly I wasn't thinking very hard while I was editing that section.

[@CatFish107]

Yo, that's wild that certain gasses will emit harmonics of the original light source!

[@xtremefps_]

First thing I thought of with this discovery was optical processors.

[@wombleofwimbledon5442]

Good job, mate.

[@MikeyMobes]

oh man if we can get images of molecule orbitals my mind would be blown

[@justinkaunda2964]

Just imagine how much faster internet speeds could be with this breakthrough.

[@vappyreon1176]

No lol we already have fiber optic which is absurdly fast and expensive, this would be even more expensive to get running, and for what benefit? It might be used in some industries for short distance but necessary information travel but you and I arent seeing noble gas lasers in our modems anytime lmao

[@Roshkin]

How many photons are in a pulse of this light?

[@bretosborne7504]

How is it possible to measure an attosecond?

[@GeoffryGifari]

does the width of the pulse related to the median frequency? is it easier to make short pulses if the highest intensity component in the pulse already has super high frequency?

[@ScienceDiscussed]

Yes higher frequencies help to make short pulses because the interference pattern is more tightly packed.

[@GeoffryGifari]

@@ScienceDiscussed imagine if the technique is applied to, lets say, X-rays!

[@ScienceDiscussed]

I think there is similar work in X-rays but I don't know off the top of my head.

[@trustmeimapotato4708]

Wonder if AI will be able to think in attoseconds being able to tap into the simulation and the outside. Like a video game character that spring to life and able to understand the world its from entirely like we made it even in ways unknown to the creator

[@jeeadvanced10]

Does that mean we are going to see an actual image of the electron in the near future?

[@user-fb7ym2fk5h]

we need to run double slit experiment with these lasers

[@cdk2309]

I appreciate this guy's super saiyan Goku figure on the bookshelf

[@mapeddd]

MARIA SKŁODOWSKA-CURIE!

[@AuaerAuraer]

This is amazing 👏

[@idontwantahandlethough]

@2:23 wait, why do all of these women have uncannily-similar shaped heads? Guys... I think I have some bad news: the Swedes are picking female Physics Nobel Laureates ON THE BASIS OF PHRENOLOGY! (but in all seriousness, Anne L'Huillier is awesome! I adore her for still teaching, she clearly loves what she does 🤗)

[@ChristopherRyans]

I have the original 1990s goku figuring Right before he transforms into super saiyan for the first time. Sorry off topic

[@ScienceDiscussed]

It is a great figurine and I think you are the first person to mention it.

[@kaseyboles30]

Still an eternity compared to planck time. 10^-18 vs 5.391247 × 10^-44 seconds. And yet this doesn't make it any less amazing an achievement.

[@energyeve2152]

I never understood how you can have a pulse significantly shorter than it’s wavelength. How can you even determine the frequency? Wouldn’t their be quantum effects of uncertainty interacting with it? This shows my lack of deep understanding in optics😅

[@BritskNguyen]

What’s the name for the next small fraction? Betosecond?