Ort: Lise-Meitner-Hörsaal, Strudlhofgasse 4, 1. Stock
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 was awarded for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics: Arthur Ashkin was honored for optical tweezers and their application to biological systems. Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland jointly received the price for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses.
After an overview of the story behind these groundbreaking inventions and their inventors, I will briefly discuss some of the scientific fields they enabled or influenced, like attosecond science, frequency combs, atom-quantum optics and optical micromanipulation. These fields continue to have a tremendous impact, partially leading to Nobel prize winning discoveries themselves. As a final topic, I will focus on a young line of research at our Faculty of Physics that directly roots in Arthur Ashkins initial experiments: Optical levitation is about to become a new tool to investigate fundamental questions in statistical physics as well as macroscopic quantum physics and may provide the basis for sensors of unmatched performance.