Scientists Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating ultra-short pulses of light that can give a snapshot of changes within atoms, potentially leading to better detection of disease.

The prize-awarding academy said their studies had given humanity new tools for exploring the movement of electrons inside atoms and molecules, a phenomenon that was long thought impossible to trace.

Changes in electrons occur in a few tenths of an attosecond, a unit so short that there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe.

"The ability to generate attosecond pulses of light has opened the door on a tiny, extremely tiny, time scale and it's also opened the door to the world of electrons," said Eva Olsson, member of the Nobel Prize in Physics Selection Committee.

There are potential applications of the findings in many different areas. In electronics, it is important to understand and control how electrons behave in a material.

The field also holds promise in areas such as a new in-vitro diagnostic technique to detect characteristic molecular traces of diseases in blood samples, the academy said.

Hungarian-born Krausz, whose team generated the first ultra-fast pulses in the early 2000s, has likened attosecond physics to a fast-shutter camera where the short light flashes allow a freeze frame look within the microcosm.

"Just as you try to photograph a Formula 1 racing car with a fast camera, for example, as it runs through the finish line. You need a camera to take sharp snapshots and reconstruct the movement," he told Reuters at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, where he is director. "This is exactly the concept we use for the fastest movements that happen in nature outside the atomic nucleus, which is the movement of electrons."

L'Huillier, who received word she had won the prize in the middle of a lecture, said, "it is really a prestigious prize and I'm so happy to get it. It's incredible." She proceeded with the lecture after the news, a half hour she described as "a bit difficult".

Only the fifth woman to win a Nobel physics prize, French-born L'Huillier works at Lund University in Sweden, while Agostini, who was also born in France, is a emeritus professor at Ohio State University in the United States.

The two French winners were congratulated by French President Emmanuel Macron, who said on social media: "What pride for our Nation!"