Arthur Ashkin

Arthur Ashkin (1922–2020) was an American physicist who pioneered optical trapping with laser light and shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for optical tweezers.

Optical tweezers: Optical tweezers use tightly focused laser light to trap and manipulate microscopic particles. Ashkin developed this laser-based trapping technique and demonstrated its use on small particles.
Donna Strickland: Donna Strickland is a Canadian physicist who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for chirped pulse amplification. She shared the 2018 prize with Ashkin and Gérard Mourou for a separate laser technology.
Optical tweezers in biology: Optical tweezers in biology use focused light to manipulate cells, organelles, and biomolecules. Ashkin demonstrated that optical traps could manipulate living cells without destroying them.
Optical force microscopy: Optical force microscopy measures small forces by tracking the displacement of an optically trapped particle. It extends Ashkin’s trapping principle into quantitative measurements of microscopic forces.
Radiation pressure: Radiation pressure is the force exerted by electromagnetic radiation when it transfers momentum to matter. Ashkin used light’s momentum transfer to explain how laser beams could push and trap particles.
Gérard Mourou: Gérard Mourou is a French physicist who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for chirped pulse amplification. He shared the prize with Ashkin and Strickland, whose work made high-intensity laser pulses practical.
Molecular motor: A molecular motor is a molecule that converts chemical energy into directed motion or mechanical work. Optical tweezers can measure the tiny forces and steps produced by molecular motors.
2018 Nobel Prize in Physics: The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics honored Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou, and Donna Strickland for laser-related discoveries. The award recognized Ashkin’s optical tweezers and their application to biological systems.
Optical trap: An optical trap confines a particle using forces produced by a structured light field. Ashkin’s experiments established how focused light gradients can confine particles in three dimensions.
Steven Chu: Steven Chu is an American physicist whose work on laser cooling and trapping atoms earned him the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics. Chu’s atom-trapping research developed a related use of laser forces after Ashkin’s pioneering experiments.

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William Daniel PhillipsRelated: His optical traps and Phillips’s atom traps both use light to control small objects, but at different scales.