Trio win physics Nobel for shedding light on optics

“We get most of our knowledge of the world around us through light,” said the Academy, calling optics “the physicists’ tool for dealing with light phenomena”.

The winning trio’s research answered such questions as how candle light differs from laser beams in a CD player and how light can measure time more accurately than an atomic clock.

Harvard University’s Glauber, who is 80, wins half of the $1.29 million prize for his theoretical description of the behaviour of light particles and establishing in 1963 the basis for quantum optics.

Decades later, Hall and Haensch, of the University of Colorado and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich respectively, worked on determining the colour of the light in atoms and molecules with extreme precision. Their findings “have made it possible to measure frequencies with an accuracy of fifteen digits”, for use in highly accurate clocks and technology for global positioning systems, said the Academy. —Reuters