A trio of laser scientists have won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work using intense beams to capture superfast processes and to manipulate tiny objects. The laureates include Donna Strickland, who is the first woman to win the award in 55 years.

Strickland, at the University of Waterloo, Canada, will share half the the 9 million Swedish krona (US$1 million) prize with her former supervisor, Gérard Mourou, from the École Polytechnique, in Palaiseau, France. The other half of the prize went to Arthur Ashkin , of Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey.

Strickland and Mourou pioneered a way to produce the shortest, most intense pulses of light ever created, which are now used throughout science to unravel processes that previously appeared instantaneous, such as the motion of electrons within atoms, as well as in laser-eye surgery.

Ashkin won the prize for his pioneering development of ' optical tweezers ', beams of laser light that can grab and control microscopic objects such as viruses and cells.

“First of all, you have to think it’s crazy, so that was my first thought," said Strickland, who spoke as part of the announcement of the prizes on 2 October. "And you do always wonder if it’s real."

The article that laid the foundations for the winning research was published in 1985, when Strickland was a PhD student.

“The innumerable areas of application have not yet been completely explored,” according to a statement released by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize. "However, even now these celebrated inventions allow us to rummage around in the microworld in the best spirit of Alfred Nobel – for the greatest benefit to humankind."

Strickland is the third woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Physics; the last female scientist to win was Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963.

“I thought there might have been more," said Strickland when asked about this aspect of the achievement. She added: "Well obviously we need to celebrate women physicists because we’re out there, and hopefully in the time it will start to move forward at a faster rate maybe. I don’t know what to say, I’m honoured to be one of those women.”

Göran K. Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the academy is "taking measures" to encourage more female nominations "because we don’t want to miss anyone". He added that those measures did not affect this year’s prize: "It’s important to remember that the Nobel prize is awarded for discoveries and inventions, and those who receive it have made major contributions to humankind, and that’s why they get the prize."

Short-lived laser pulses allow scientists to spy on processes that are over in a heartbeat. But before Strickland and Mourou’s revolutionary technique, the intensity of laser pulses was limited, because their high power risked destroying the amplifier needed to create high intensity.

Their breakthrough was to use a grating to stretch out a laser beam pulse in time. This reduced the light’s power and allowed conventional amplifiers to boost its intensity, before the pulse could be squeezed back together into a short and more powerful blast – a process known as Chirped Pulse Amplification.

Originally outlined in Strickland’s 1985 publication – her first ever scientific paper – improvements to the technique now allow scientists to generate LASER pulses on the scale of attoseconds – billionths of a billionth of a second. Like a video camera taking ever more frames per second, these pulses can be used to study rapidly-evolving processes such as the chemistry of photosynthesis and electrons moving within atoms. Moreover as fleeting pulses cause less damage than longer ones, ultra-short light pulses have found uses in laser-eye surgery and drilling ever-sharper holes in data-storage materials that allow for more efficient memories.

John Dudley, an optical physicist at the University of Franche-Comté in France, says that Strickland and Mourou’s chirped pulse amplification was a breakthrough both as a basic science advance and as a technological development. “Nobels are awarded for a discovery or an invention. This really bridges the two."

Dudley adds: “Neither are scientists that remained in their ivory towers.” He notes that Mourou, in particular, has been the driving force for the Extreme Light Infrastructure, a consortium for the development of large laser infrastructure.

He adds that Mourou is a polymath who composes music and has a broad interest in the humanities.

Dudley says that it’s particularly significant that Strickland was recognised for work she did as a graduate student. This contrasts with the case of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the British astrophysicist who discovered pulsars but who was passed over when her advisor shared the 1974 Nobel Prize. “It’s wonderful to see that Nobel committee has listened to the community and to the negative reaction to that decision at the time,” Dudley says.

At 96, Ashkin is the oldest-ever Nobel laureate. His prize-winning work began immediately after the laser’s invention in 1960. Lasers exert a gentle pressure on tiny objects, which Ashkin realised could be used to manipulate them without damaging them. His experiments with micrometre-sized spheres in the 1960s showed that the particles were drawn to the highest-intensity region in a beam of light. This led to a way to sculpt laser beams in order to trap, levitate and move objects. Now known as optical tweezers, Ashkin discovered that these highly-focused laser ‘fingers’ could capture bacteria, viruses and living cells.

“I’m absolutely ecstatic for him. He’s such a nice guy,” says Miles Padgett, an optical physicist at the University of Glasgow, UK.

He says that Ashkin’s invention has had a universally recognized impact, and especially in biophysics. Today optical tweezers are used in myriad applications from separating healthy blood cells from infected ones to engineering nanoscale materials.

Padgett applauds the way that Ashkin kept improving the technique and making the devices simpler. “I think it’s wonderful when people plow through. Just keep on making it better and better.”

He says that he and many others in the optical-tweezer community had assumed that Ashkin had been sidestepped in 1997, when Stephen Chu shared the Nobel in Physics for a related technique. “I thought he’d missed his chance so to speak.”