The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics” with one half to Arthur Ashkin, from Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, USA, “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems”. The other half goes jointly to Gérard Mourou, École Polytechnique, Palaiseau (France) and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (USA)and to Donna Strickland, University of Waterloo (Canada) “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses”.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 awarded to LIGO collaboration
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 with one half to
Rainer Weiss, LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration and the other half jointly to
Barry C. Barish, LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration and
Kip S. Thorne, LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration
“for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2016 with one half to David J. Thouless (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA) and the other half to F. Duncan M. Haldane (Princeton University, NJ, USA) and J. Michael Kosterlitz (Brown University, Providence, RI, USA)
Nobel Prize Serge Haroche in Mulhouse for a “conférence exceptionnelle”
The Université de Haute-Alsace in Mulhouse (France) received the visit of the French Nobel Laureate Serge Haroche on 10 June 2016. During his visit, Prof. Haroche gave a lecture as the final event of the European project LIGHT2015, a project coordinated by the European Physical Society that have organized around 120 events in 30 European countries during the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies 2015 (IYL 2015).
2015 Nobel Prize in Physics to T. Kajita and A.B. McDonald
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2015 to Takaaki Kajita, Super-Kamiokande Collaboration, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan, and Arthur B. McDonald, Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
Light for the 2014 Nobel Prizes in Physics and in Chemistry
The Nobel Committee has awarded this year two practical inventions, the blue Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) and the super-resolved fluorescence microscopy. Those are revolutionary and both use light to overcome technological barriers.
The 2014 Physics Nobel Prize goes to Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano from Japan, and to Shuji Nakamura from USA, “for the invention of efficient blue light emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”. In the past producing bright visible light was routinely done by using semi-conductor diodes, to make…
Blackett Laboratory, place of dozen discoveries
The Blackett Laboratory, home of the Department of Physics of the Imperial College based in London, United-Kingdom, was designated as EPS Historic Site on 30 April 2014. The Imperial College physicist Professor Tom Kibble had the privilege to unveil the commemorative plaque in presence of a large audience and EPS President John Dudley. Prof. Antonino Zichichi, past EPS president and member of the Blackett Group was invited to give a talk at the ceremony.
Since its inauguration in 1961, the building has hosted numerous eminent physicists, including…
Editorial — Bringing Nobel Prize physics to high schools
Today much of the ethical and political decision-making involves some understanding of the nature of science, its strengths and limits. There is perhaps no better or more recent example of this need, than the debate that arose around the discovery of the Higgs Boson and the operation of LHC at CERN, which has sparked the imagination of authors of works of fiction, occasionally causing concern among the general public. To understand the role of science in deliberations about the projected outcomes of the experiments taking place in the LHC, their safety and value – given the immense investment in human and other resources involved – all students, including future scientists need…
Editorial – Forward Physics!
I had the tremendous pleasure of watching the Nobel Prize announcement on October 8 during the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft’s Live from Stockholm event held at the Magnus-Haus in Berlin. The assembly of high-level scientists and journalists made for a stimulating mix, and the delay prior to the announcement provided much opportunity for speculation and animated discussion!Of course, when it eventually was made, the announcement of the award to François Englert and Peter Higgs was met with tremendous pleasure. More details and background to this years’s Nobel Prize is given in another entry of this edition of e-EPS…
Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 to François Englert and Peter Higgs
On 8 October 2013, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 jointly to François Englert (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium) and Peter W. Higgs (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s…
Editorial – Community celebration of physics
Like all areas of modern science, physics today is more and more specialized. Workers in different subfields interact with each other rarely, and it is easy to forget that we form part of a community of scientists studying the one fundamental subject concerned with the nature of matter on all scales.
There is, however, one regular reminder of the importance of physics as a fundamental discipline of science. This…
Featured in EPN
Most recent highlights from EPN:
Nobel 2012: trapped ions and photons
A Tribute to Max von Laue
Sensitive magnetometers based on dark states …
