Reacción a "Reactions: Nobel Prize in Physics to Agostini, Krausz and L'Huillier for developing light pulses to study the motion of electrons in matter"

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with previous years such as 2018, once again highlights the importance of optics, lasers and photonics from a scientific and technological point of view. The work of the award winners laid the foundations of attophysics. Optical tools are essential in a multitude of applications, allowing interaction with materials with high spatial resolution in applications such as microscopy, biomedicine or materials processing, among many others.

Ultra-short and ultra-intense laser technology is unique for several reasons. On the one hand, it allows a temporal resolution unmatched by other techniques, thanks to the production of ultra-short pulses on an attosecond scale (1 attosecond = 10^-18 seconds, i.e. 1/1000000000000000000 seconds). This is where one of the keys to this Nobel Prize lies, thanks to the discovery, understanding and management of the process of generating high order harmonics. The electromagnetic fields that propagate in visible light oscillate on slightly longer time scales, but the process studied makes it possible to generate pulsed lasers in other spectral ranges (extreme ultraviolet and X-rays), in which the light oscillates even faster and allows shorter pulses to be obtained. On the other hand, these light sources are able to interact with the structure of matter at deeper levels, which has made it possible to study electronic and even nuclear dynamics on ultrafast scales.

In recent years, I have interacted scientifically with Professor Anne L'Huillier through the collaboration between the University of Salamanca, the University of Porto, the University of Lund and the company Sphere Ultrafast Photonics (spin-off of which she is co-founder), with developments and publications related to the dispersion scan technique used to temporarily measure the laser pulses that produce the harmonic generation process.