Laser tools bag physics Nobel as first woman wins prize for 55 years

This year’s physics Nobel is all about light–matter interaction. One half of the prize went to the inventor of optical tweezers, Arthur Ashkin, while Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou, the scientists who pioneered a method to generate high-intensity laser pulses, shared the prize’s other half. Their work has influenced divergent scientific fields, from revolutionising eye surgery to uncovering ultrafast reaction dynamics.