Dr. Igor Vaskivskyi (IJS): Nobel Prize in Physics 2023

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L'Huillier for their groundbreaking work in developing experimental methods "that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter".
Anne L'Huillier was the first to show high-harmonic generation in a noble gas, which laid the groundwork for subsequent breakthroughs. Pierre Agostini developed the so-called RABBIT (reconstruction of attosecond beating by interference of two-photon transitions) technique, which provided a way to reveal the temporal structure of the generated pulses. Ferenc Krausz managed to isolate and use a single attosecond pulse.
With these three milestones, the door to the attosecond time scale is wide open, and the stage is now prepared for studying the dynamics which were never accessible before. We will review all aspects of working on the attosecond time scale, generating such extremely short laser pulses, detecting them and, finally, why we might need them.
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