Arthur Ashkin, Nobel-winning physicist who trapped molecules with light, dies at 98 - The Washington Post

Arthur Ashkin, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who harnessed the power of light to levitate particles and take hold of living cells, developing “optical tweezers” that emerged as a powerful new tool to probe molecular processes and human diseases, died Sept.

Ashkin became the oldest Nobel laureate in history when he earned the physics prize in 2018, at age 96, for inventing optical tweezers more than three decades earlier.

A longtime researcher at what is now Nokia Bell Labs in New Jersey, Dr.

His breakthrough, reported in a 1970 paper that was published despite initial skepticism from Bell Labs, marked the first step toward the creation of optical tweezers.

The instrument uses “laser beam fingers,” as the Nobel Prize committee put it, to grab atoms, viruses, bacteria and other living cells, and has been credited with paving the way for advances including the development of a malaria blood test and cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Grier, a physicist at New York University, told the New York Times in 2018.

“To do real physics you have to push to the extreme,” he told the New York Times in 1986, after the Bell Labs team succeeded in using seven lasers to cool and trap atoms in a field known as “optical molasses.” Their experiments were spearheaded by Chu, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997.

Ashkin reported in two separate papers that he had used infrared lasers to capture and move viruses, bacteria and single cells, announcing the arrival of optical tweezers as a new tool for scientists studying microbes and cellular structures.

He later said that he and a colleague, Joe Dziedzic, had initially trapped living things by accident, after leaving an experiment running overnight and discovering that bacteria were trapped inside.

“When I described catching living things with light,” he recalled, “people said, ‘Don’t exaggerate, Ashkin.’ ” Soon, he told Business Insider last year, colleagues had a different reaction: “Oh, you got to see this — Ashkin’s trapping bugs.

His brother cast a long shadow — “I was known as ‘Ashkin’s brother Ashkin,’ ” he later said — and the younger Ashkin decided to switch fields, joining Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1952 to study microwaves.

On a scientific level, he would give ideas to people and was not trying to take credit — he probably took credit less than he deserved,” his friend René-Jean Essiambre, a Bell Labs physicist, said in a phone interview.

Ashkin split the Nobel with Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland, who developed a way to generate “high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses” with a laser.

Ashkin continued working from his home laboratory long after retiring from Bell Labs.

Ashkin told Business Insider he believed that his new method of making cheap power would “save the world” — and was worthy of a second Nobel Prize