Arthur Ashkin, Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland win Nobel Prize 2018 in Physics

Stockholm, Oct 2: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 to Arthur Ashkin, Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland. These scientists have been selected for their groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics.

"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the #NobelPrize in Physics 2018 "for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics" with one half to Arthur Ashkin and the other half jointly to Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland," a tweet on official The Nobel Prize handle said.

The winners will be awarded with nine million kronor (£770,000) which has been decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said reports.

Arthur Ashkin is an American scientist who worked at Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies. He started his work on manipulation of microparticles with laser light in the late 1960s which resulted in the invention of optical tweezers in 1986.

Gérard Mourou is a French pioneer in the field of electrical engineering and lasers. He has been the director of the Laboratoire d'Optique Appliquee at the ENSTA (Palaiseau, France) and is a professor at the École Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France). He was the founding director of the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science (CUOS) at the University of Michigan in 1990.

Donna Strickland is a Canadian professor who is a pioneer in the field of lasers. She is the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Nobel Prize is a set of six annual international awards bestowed in several categories by Swedish and Norwegian institutions in recognition of academic, cultural, or scientific advances.