In the past decade, no fewer than four Nobel Prizes—one in chemistry and three in physics—were awarded for work done on the science of atoms and molecules interacting with laser light. The remarkable efforts that led to those prizes mark the latest stage in the gradual transformation of lasers, still less than a half-century old, from sources of directed photons for spectroscopy to something more: tools for the control of the quantum world. New lasers are reaching previously unknown regimes of intensity, stability, wavelength, and pulse duration. And those developments are driving new cross-disciplinary research in atomic, solid-state, and x-ray physics; quantum optics; physical chemistry; and laser engineering.
The 10 laureates who shared the four Nobel Prizes in the past 10 years have helped shape the new discipline of laser-driven quantum control. Nine come from the field of atomic, molecular, and optical physics. A recent National Research Council interim...
