With the "Scientist of the Year" award, the Club of Education and Science Journalists is honouring the efforts of scientists to communicate their work and their discipline to a broad public for the 30th time. This year Glacier researcher Andrea Fischer won the award for her outstanding job of communicating the importance of research on ongoing climate change and the associated glacier retreat in particular to the general public.

Alison Patteson is the recipient of the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award 2024 from the American Physical Society.

This week, Francesca Ferlaino has been awarded the Grete Rehor-Staatspreis, presented for the first time this year, for her contribution to gender equality in the field of quantum physics and for the “Atom*innen” project she initiated. The award was presented to her by the Federal Minister Susanne Raab. Many congratulations!

The national prize is awarded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Women, Family, Integration and Media.

Michelle Simmons won the Prime Minister's Prize for Science in Australia.

Anne L'Huillier is the 5th women to win the Nobel Prize in physics.

Price motivation

“for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”

Work

In the world of electrons, changes occur in a few tenths of an attosecond. An attosecond is one billionth of a billionth of a second. Experiments with such short pulses of light make it possible to provide images of processes taking place inside atoms and molecules. In 1987, Anne L’Huillier discovered that many different overtones of light arose when she transmitted infrared laser light through a noble gas. She continued to explore this phenomenon, laying the ground for subsequent breakthroughs in producing attosecond pulses.

Anne L’Huillier – Facts – 2023. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2024. Thu. 15 Feb 2024.<https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/lhuillier/facts/>

Anamaría Font is one of the 2023 winners of the international l'Oréal-UNESCO prize. Professor of Physics at the Central University of Venezuela, Anamaría Font is renowned for her work in theoretical particle physics, and more specifically for developing the theory of superstrings. This theory provides a unified and coherent description of nature's elementary particles. Her research has made it possible to investigate the consequences of the theory for the structure of matter and quantum gravity, which are also relevant to the description of black holes and the first instants after the big bang.

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