The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics: Optical tweezers and ultra-short laser pulses

The Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics to three key optics pioneers “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics.” Half of the prize was awarded to Arthur Ashkin, formerly of Bell Laboratories, USA, “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems”; and the other half was shared by Gérard Mourou of the École Polytechnique, France, and Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo, Canada, “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses.”