Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier received the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday. The prize is a momentous reward for their groundbreaking experiments that “have furnished humanity with innovative tools to delve into the intricate world of electrons within atoms and molecules,” the New York Times reports.

The study of electrons’ swift movements within atoms and molecules requires a unit of measurement known as “attoseconds -” a millionth of a trillionth of a second. The laureates’ experiments successfully demonstrated the observation and quantification of these attosecond pulses, marking a significant leap in human understanding of the quantum realm.

According to the awarding committee, the experiments showcased that these astonishingly brief bursts of light could be captured and studied.

Eva Olsson, the chair of the Nobel committee for Physics, emphasised the profound implications of attosecond science, noting that it “allows us to address fundamental questions.” One of such question involves the time scale of the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon for which Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.

To put the concept of an attosecond into perspective, consider that it is equivalent to one-millionth of a trillionth of a second. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, responsible for awarding the physics prize, illustrated the sheer scale by equating the number of attoseconds in one second to the number of seconds that have elapsed since the universe’s inception approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

With the attosecond realm now within reach, the Nobel committee declared on the social platform X, “these short bursts of light can be used to study the movements of electrons.”

Each laureate brings a wealth of expertise to this pioneering work. Pierre Agostini holds the title of emeritus professor at Ohio State University, while Ferenc Krausz serves as the director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany and holds a professorship in experimental physics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Anne L’Huillier is a distinguished professor at Lund University in Sweden.

In their commendation, the awarding committee lauded the laureates for demonstrating a method to generate extremely brief pulses of light capable of measuring the rapid processes in which electrons either change their energy states or traverse within atoms and molecules. This breakthrough has unlocked the ability to investigate processes of unparalleled speed that were once deemed inaccessible to scientific scrutiny.