STOCKHOLM, October 8. /TASS/. The Nobel Week will continue in the Swedish capital on Tuesday with the announcement of the Nobel Prize winner in physics.
The Nobel Prize has been awarded 621 times since 1901. The prize in Physics has been awarded 117 times, to 225 laureates in total.
The names of laureates are kept secret until the moment of announcement. Clarivate, a company that has been trying to forecast the names of laureates based on citation records and societal impact of their research, forecasts that this year’s award may go to three scientists - Rafi Bistritzer of Israel, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero of the United States and his compatriot Allan H. MacDonald. The prize will be awarded for their "pioneering theoretical and experimental contributions to the physics of magic angle twisted bilayer graphene and related moir· quantum devices."
Other potential candidates are David Deutsch of the United Kingdom and Peter W. Shor of the United States for their "revolutionary contributions to quantum algorithms and computing."
The prize may also go to Christoph Gerber of Switzerland "for invention and application of atomic force microscopy."
Winners of last year’s prize
Last year, the award went to French-American Pierre Agostini, Hungarian-Austrian scientist Ferenc Krausz and French Anne L’Huillier, "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter."
"We can now open the door to the world of electrons. Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand mechanisms that are governed by electrons. The next step will be utilizing them," says Eva Olsson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
According to the Nobel Committee, there are potential applications of this discovery in many different fields. "In electronics, for example, it is important to understand and control how electrons behave in a material. Attosecond pulses can also be used to identify different molecules, such as in medical diagnostics," the committee said.