The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland – Quartz

You probably do not think much about lasers. But they revolutionized our lives. They are used in all fields, from reading bar codes to the development of intercontinental missiles. Their impact is so important that four Nobel Prizes in physics have already been awarded – in 1964, 1981, 1997 and 2005 – for fundamental work in lasers.

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics honors two other important work on lasers. Arthur Ashkin, a former Bell Labs employee in the United States, received the Development Award for "Optical Gripper and its Application to Biological Systems". Gérard Mourou of the École Polytechnique in France and Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo in Canada were awarded "for their method of generating ultra-short and high-intensity optical pulses. (It should be noted that Strickland is the first woman in 55 years and the only third woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, why so few women win this prize?

Ashkin started playing with lasers shortly after their invention in the 1960s. In simple terms, lasers are bundles of bright particles called photons. Ashkin realized that if he had enough photons, it would be possible to create a "radiative" pressure on the objects. More importantly, Ashkin understood that even though a laser is a focused beam of light, it contains more photons in the middle of a beam than at its edges. The difference created a natural gradient, which could be exploited to hold objects in place with nothing but two of these lasers. It's become what we know today as "optical tweezers".

Ashkin then used optical tweezers to hold the bacteria. Then, with even more precise lasers, he began to study the interior of microbes without destroying them. Others have continued his work using lasers to modify molecular machines inside living cells. In other words, Ashkin had created a real version of the tractor beam that Star Trek had made famous in the 1960s.

Strickland and Mourou, meanwhile, were inspired by a popular science article to propose an idea for another use of lasers. Strickland, then at the University of Rochester, had started a doctorate at the Mourou laboratory. Together, their goal was to create very powerful but short-lived lasers. Until the 1980s, attempts to create such lasers inevitably broke the amplification instruments because of the amount of energy needed for this task.

What Strickland and Mourou discovered was that stretching a laser reduced its maximum power, amplified using normal instruments. It could then be compressed to create the short-lived and very powerful lasers they were looking for. This technique, described in Strickland's first scientific publication, is known as Pulsed Pulse Amplification (CPA). They probably did not know it at the time, but the tools created by Strickland and Mourou made it possible to study natural phenomena in an unprecedented way.

The CPA could be used to create a laser pulse that lasts only one attosecond, a billionth of a billionth of a second. At these time scales, it became possible to study not only the chemical reactions, but also what happens inside the atoms.

Lasers can also be used to make very accurate cuts in materials such as semiconductor chips; store data on solid state hard drives; and custom-made medical stents to expand and strengthen blood vessels.

"There are innumerable areas of use that have not yet been fully explored," the Nobel Committee says. "Every step forward allows researchers to better understand new worlds by modifying both basic research and practical applications."

Beyond lasers, this year's Nobel Prize rewards some of the underestimated scientific work: the creation of tools. Ashkin, Mourou and Strickland have not decided to create something for all the applications mentioned above. They decided to create the tools that, to their knowledge, would have a lot of potential for different applications, even if they could not create the applications themselves. This is the kind of basic research that requires a lot of investment without knowing it will be profitable. Fortunately, these scientists trust the process.

You can read all of Quartz's coverage of the 2018 Nobel Prizes here.