Nobel Prize call: Krausz picked up “for once.”

After guiding visitors through laboratories at the open day of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching near Munich, Krausz needed a break around 11 a.m. on Tuesday. He wanted to “do something useful” and on Monday started watching an interview with Katalin Karikó, the newly minted Nobel laureate in medicine, Krausz told reporters on Tuesday.

“It quickly became clear that I couldn’t hang up”
He couldn’t hear his Hungarian compatriot for a long time because his mobile phone was ringing. The display said “No Caller ID” – a suppressed number. Such calls can “face questionable concerns,” the scientist said. “I thought: I’ll give it a try. Then it became clear very quickly that I couldn’t hang up this time,” he said.

The physicist explained that he felt “absolutely overwhelmed” by the news from the Nobel Prize Committee that he, along with his colleague Pierre Agostini and colleague Anne L’Huillier, would receive the highest award for achievements in physics. “I have been trying since the eleventh hour to determine whether I am reality or whether it is a long dream. There are signs that it could be reality,” Krausz said with a wink. “Such an award requires great humility,” he became serious again.

Pioneer in attosecond physics
At the press conference, the head of the MPQ’s attosecond physics department explained to laypeople what he was researching: “If you want to track fast-moving objects, you need a fast camera.” Electrons move in the space of attoseconds. The experimental methods of L’Huillier, Agostini and Krausz made it possible to generate attosecond light flashes and thus measure electron movements (see also the graph below).

The practical advantage of this? “In our biological life, electrons form the glue between the atoms that make up the molecules. If you want to better understand how they work, you cannot ignore a better understanding of electron movements,” emphasizes the 61-year-old physicist.

Major research with blood samples
The physicist and his colleagues in attosecond physics at the MPQ have been investigating for years how these methods can be used in medicine. A major study was started together with the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting (CMF) in Budapest. We work with doctors who take blood samples. These are illuminated with infrared light, the molecules in the blood then emit a signal that is scanned using attosecond measurement technology.

“From this we can deduce which molecules the blood is made of,” the Nobel Prize winner for physics explained. This can then provide information about cancer, cardiovascular disease or diabetes.

research for decades
The foundations of attosecond physics date back to the 1980s and 1990s, and Krausz has also been conducting research for decades. In 2001, he and his team at the Technical University of Vienna succeeded for the first time in generating and measuring individual flashes of light in the attosecond range of extreme ultraviolet light.

The Nobel Laureate also praised the achievements of his fellow laureates, Anne L’Huillier and Pierre Agostini, but also mentioned the achievements of Paul Corkum of the University of Ottawa (Canada), who received the award – as the rules of the Nobel Prize Academy had stated it, which limits the maximum number of laureates to three people – “would have deserved it”. Krausz emphasized how important institutional funding is for research that costs a lot of money, but ‘where you don’t know whether it will ultimately work out well.’