Strickland: Record breaking work
BY TAIWO FAROTIMI
A female physicist, Donna Strickland, an assistant professor from Canada is one of the three academics to win the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics. She is the third woman in history to have been so recognised. The Nobel committee announced this Tuesday.
Fifty-nine-year old Strickland will however take a quarter of the prize money (about 770,000 pounds). She will share half of the prize money with Gérard Morou in France. A half of the whole money will go to Arthur Ashkin, an American physicist for the development of “optical tweezers” which have allowed tiny organisms to be handled with light beams.
This is how the Nobel announced it on its Twitter handle “Arthur Ashkin, awarded the 2018 #NobelPrize, had a dream: imagine if beams of light could be put to work and made to move objects. He realised his dream by creating a light trap, which became known as optical tweezers.”
The scientist is joined by two other colleagues for this year’s award. According to the Nobel committee, the other two scientists won “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses.” The Nobel had announced on Monday the prize for medicine won by two professors whose work have advanced the treatment of cancer.