Speaker: Professor Amy Oldenburg, UNC-Chapel Hill

Title: Understanding the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry 2023: generating new types of light to enable unprecedented scientific studies and novel technologies

This talk will review the research trajectories and science underlying the recent Nobel prizes in Physics and Chemistry.  In physics, the award goes to three researchers involved in generating pulses of light on the atto-second (10^-18 second) time scale, research that spanned decades and incremental development of laser technologies. These short pulses can be thought of as a type of super-short strobe light that now enable new studies of electron motion. In chemistry, the award goes to three researchers who discovered and developed “quantum dots”, tiny light-emitters that produce different wavelengths of light depending upon their size. This size-dependent light emission is an effect of quantum physics, and the quantum dots offer a huge potential in novel devices and biological research.