France’s Pierre Agostini, Hungarian-Austrian Ferenc Krausz and French-Swedish Anne L’Huillier were awarded the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for research into tools for exploring electrons inside atoms and molecules. The trio was honoured “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”, the jury said, adding that the research had potential applications in both electronics and medical diagnostics. “An attosecond is so short that there are as many in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe” over 13 billion years ago, it added. The researchers “have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy”, the jury said.