Breakthroughs in Nobel Prize-winning Research on Chemistry and Physics

1. ½ ¼ each 5th woman to wing Nobel prize in Chemistry

2. Frances Arnold More recent work: S. B. Jennifer Kan, Russell D. Lewis, Kai Chen, Frances H. Arnold* Directed evolution of cytochrome c for carbon–silicon bond formation: Bringing silicon to life Science  25 Nov 2016:Vol. 354, Issue 6315, pp. 1048-1051 DOI: 10.1126/science.aah6219

3. 6 page paper in 1993, 26 refs.

4. George Smith Building up very large libraries of which gene sequence codes for which capsule protein with which exposed peptide, basis research

5. Gregory Winter In a sense, application of “directed evolution” to the development of human antibodies (specific proteins) from the antibodies of other mammals by means of George Smith’s phage display technique

6. Arthur Ashkin ½, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland ¼ each 3rd woman to win Nobel prize in Physics

7. First paper in the field: A. Askin, Phys. Rev. Lett. 24 (1970) 156

8. It is important that the particles are more or less spherical, the smaller the particles, the faster they move around at any one temperature

9. Limitation: wavelength of light is several hundreds of nanometers, in the far-field this leads to diffraction limited “confinement radii” of about one half of the wavelength of light

10. Note the sigmoid function that is approximated over 5 orders of magnitude by a piece-wise exponential function !

11. Physics Nobel Prize 2018: Gérard Mourou andDonna Strickland ¼ each, for work first demonstrated in 1985 in PhD thesis of DS allows for ultrafast spectroscopy of chemical reactions, ….

12. 10-9 sec 10-15 sec

13. 10-18 sec, a technological development allows to push the science frontier

14. first Nobel Prize involving optical traps was for laser cooling in 1997, Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, the breakthroughs were made in the 1980s • Room temperature: atoms in a gas move with velocities of about 4,000 km/h • 270 °C: atoms move with velocities of 400 km/hr • 1 µK: atoms move with velocities of 1 km/hr (= 25 cm/s) At the intersection of several laser beams at sufficiently low temperatures, trapped atoms condense into a new state of matter, to be described by a single wavefunstion (a Bose-Einstein condensate) move as if they were within a thick liquid, the name optical molasses was coined. 

15. 8 pages, 43 refs. “Single atom loading succeeds approximately half of the time. … Isolated collisions between two atoms do not usually result in molecule formation due to the need to simultaneously conserve momentum and energy. … the atoms can change their hyperfine states after colliding, and the exothermic hyper-fine-spin-changing collisions impart enough kinetic energy (≈ 100 mK) to the atoms to eject them from the tweezers (≈ 1 mK depth).

17. ℏ reduced Planck constant µ reduced mass, …  quantum numbers