French and American scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their work with light and matter, which may lead the way to superfast computers and "the most precise clocks ever seen," the prize committee said.
Serge Haroche of France and David Wineland of the United States will share the $1.2 million prize, the second of six Nobel Prizes announced this month.
The award surprised those who expected the physics Nobel this year to be related to the discovery of the Higgs boson, considered one of the top scientific achievements of the past 50 years.
Wineland and Haroche work in the field of quantum optics, approaching the same principles from opposite directions. The American uses light particles to measure the properties of matter, whereas his French colleague focuses on tracking light particles by using atoms.
Both Nobel laureates have found ways to isolate the subatomic particles and keep their properties intact at the same time, scientists at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in Stockholm, Sweden.
Usually when these particles interact with the outside world, the properties that scientists would like to directly observe disappear, leaving researchers postulating over what is going on with them.
The two have found a way around this, making direct observation possible. "The new methods allow them to examine, control and count the particles," the academy said.
Haroche is a professor at the College de France and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and Wineland is group leader and NIST Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado Boulder.
Their work has some potential side benefits to future technology.
"Their ground-breaking methods have enabled this field of research to take the very first steps towards building a new type of super fast computer based on quantum physics," the academy said.