NIZHNY NOVGOROD, October 9. /TASS/. Winner of the 2018 Physics Nobel Prize Gerard Mourou who worked with scientists of the Applied Physics Institute within the Russian Academy of Sciences plans to visit Russia shortly and meet with his colleagues, President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Sergeyev said on Tuesday.
"He was due to come here [to Nizhny Novgorod] next week, October 15, to attend thesis defense. But he apologized, saying that he couldn’t come right now but would do so in the near future," the academician said.
"We invited him to a UNESCO conference on science in Moscow in late November and he gave his preliminary consent to participate in it," Sergeyev said during his visit to the Applied Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
According to the academician who headed the Applied Physics Institute in 2015-2017, Mourou said that he had liked "the abundance of music" when he had lived and worked in Nizhny Novgorod.
"Indeed, we frequently attended concerts with him here and it is very important that traditionally (our institute is famous, for example, for holding conferences aboard passenger liners on the Volga River every year) renowned musicians are invited to these events. And this produces a very strong impression, especially on foreigners," Sergeyev said.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 was awarded "for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics," the organization’s website said. One half of the prize was awarded to Arthur Ashkin "for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems" and the other half jointly to Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland "for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses."
Mourou was awarded the Nobel Prize for the invention based on his joint work with scientists of the Applied Physics Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences.