Illustration of the French physicist Pierre Agostini (born 1941). In 2001 Agostini and colleagues generated the first series of consecutive attosecond (one billionth of a billionth of a second) pulses of light, with each pulse lasting just 250 attoseconds. Such short pulses allow the behaviour of electrons in atoms and molecules to be studied. Agostini was awarded a share of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Anne LHuillier and Ferenc Krausz, for his work.