The celebrations were extremely unscientific, namely improvised. A bottle of champagne was not chilled. And when she was finally found, the glasses were missing. There were no champagne flutes to be found, only glass latte macchiato cups, which Ferenc Krausz used to convey a message that was important to him: “You see! All our money goes into research,” shouted the Nobel Prize winner when he spoke on Tuesday In Garching, some of his employees toasted the success with warm champagne in front of the photographers who rushed to the scene.
At least a third of the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Munich. To be more precise, mainly in the north of the state capital, in Garching, where the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics is located and Krausz, who is also a physics professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU), in the laboratories at the very northern end of the campus created the research setups for his domain: the generation and measurement of light pulses of less than a femtosecond. So it’s a Nobel Prize that comes from just before the field border.
Krausz’s research group consists of around 120 employees: experts from the fields of physics, molecular biology, computer science, technology and engineering, who come from three sources – the LMU, the Max Planck Society and a molecular center at the University of Budapest . “Atoworld”, that’s what the entire group calls itself. The structures may not be easy to understand from the outside, but inside it is a true togetherness, Krausz assured on Tuesday afternoon in an almost unreal atmosphere.
The Max Planck Institute invited people to the “Mouse Opener Day”, an open day so to speak, where children in particular are intended to get excited about the world of science. And so it happened that many young, curious people headed towards the institute at the end of subway line 6, many with pale blue sun shields on their heads, which were generously distributed for the occasion. Krausz had agreed to give a lecture on his research in the afternoon. He wanted to prepare for this in the morning. During a break, he started a video with an interview with the biochemist Katalin Karikó, who like him comes from Hungary and had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine the day before. Shortly afterwards his cell phone rang, but the caller’s number was blocked. “I don’t normally answer it,” Krausz said later. However, given the deadline, he made an exception. “Shortly after that, I knew I wasn’t going to hang up so quickly.”
He made a breakthrough in a basement laboratory in Vienna
It was the Nobel Prize Committee that awarded him and the French Pierre Agostini and the French Anne L’Huillier the award for the field of physics. It can be seen that German Unity Day for Krausz did not go ahead as planned. And not just for him. The employees of the Max Planck Institute had been preparing for Mouse Day for months, and now it was also a Nobel Prize Day. An appearance by the honoree was quickly set up for 3 p.m., which was to be streamed all over the world.
But before that, Krausz still had to give his lecture. The unexpected news didn’t stop him. And so around a hundred astonished people in the small lecture room on the ground floor learned first-hand how he came to win the world’s most famous science prize. In jeans, a light jacket and white sneakers, Krausz performed in front of randomly laid out yoga mats what he has been doing for decades: tracking the fastest processes that occur in nature outside of the atomic nucleus – the movement of electrons.
He made a breakthrough one night at the beginning of September 2001, in a basement laboratory in Vienna, where he and his group were still doing research at the time. Inspired by the realization, Krausz crawled into bed. When he turned on the television the next day, he saw the burning towers of the World Trade Center after the Islamic terrorist attacks. Science can be so big – and sometimes very small: Krausz is obviously aware of this. And he is a good storyteller.
His profession is basic research. What practical use his findings might have at some point – this question still arises. Krausz gives two answers to this this afternoon: On the one hand, electrons may at some point be able to detect diseases before they break out. Breast cancer, for example, lung, bladder or prostate cancer. Various studies are being carried out on this subject – in cooperation with human medicine specialists at the LMU.
He answers every question with scientific care
Secondly, computers may eventually be able to be accelerated. Currently, their performance is limited, among other things, by the fact that the time it takes to switch the power on and off to generate bits has not been possible for some time. Krausz Angang could point the way to further acceleration here. “Perhaps by a factor of 100,000,” he says, pronouncing the big word extremely calmly.
You can see that he is happy about the Nobel Prize. But he doesn’t lose his temper. He answers every question – whether from the audience at his lecture or later at the impromptu press conference – with scientific care. And one thing is important to him in many ways: thanks for making his expensive research in Munich so generously possible. “There couldn’t be better conditions,” he praises, before being surprised by a special well-wisher: Theodor Hänsch, who also worked at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005 for his pioneering work in the field of laser spectroscopy , had spontaneously set out for Mouse Day.