A life in context
The person behind the prize
Agostini trained in France and built his career around the interaction of strong laser light with atoms. His experiments helped turn very short bursts of light into instruments that could be measured and used. At the time of the award he was associated with The Ohio State University in the United States.
The contribution
In 2001, his team produced a sequence of light pulses lasting about 250 attoseconds each and measured their duration. A repeating train of flashes became a way to investigate changes that ordinary instruments would blur together.
The idea in plain language
Electrons rearrange far faster than atoms move. To measure that motion, an instrument needs an exceptionally short time window. An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second: 10⁻¹⁸ seconds.
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