FILE- In this April 17, 2015, file photo a national library employee shows the gold Nobel Prize medal awarded to the late novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in Bogota, Colombia. This year’s round of Nobel... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE- In this April 17, 2015, file photo a national library employee shows the gold Nobel Prize medal awarded to the late novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in Bogota, Colombia. This year’s round of Nobel Prizes begins Monday, Oct. 1, 2018, with the award for medicine or physiology, honoring research... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE- In this April 17, 2015, file photo a national library employee shows the gold Nobel Prize medal awarded to the late novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in Bogota, Colombia. This year’s round of Nobel Prizes begins Monday, Oct. 1, 2018, with the award for medicine or physiology, honoring research... (Associated Press) FILE- In this April 17, 2015, file photo a national library employee shows the gold Nobel Prize medal awarded to the late novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in Bogota, Colombia. This year’s round of Nobel... (Associated Press) 
 
 STOCKHOLM (AP) — The Latest on the awarding of the Nobel Prizes (all times local): 
 
 11:45 a.m. 
 
 Three scientists from the United States, France and Canada have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for advances in laser physics. 
 
 The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences on Tuesday awarded half the 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize to Arthur Ashkin of the United States and the other half will be shared by Gerard Mourou of France and Canada's Donna Strickland. 
 
 The academy says Ashkin developed "optical tweezers" that can grab tiny particles such as viruses without damaging them. 
 
 Strickland and Mourou helped develop short and intense laser pulses that have broad industrial and medical applications. 
 
 ___ 
 
 7:15 a.m. 
 
 The Nobel Prize for physics honors researchers for discoveries in phenomena as enormous as The Big Bang and as tiny as single particles of light. 
 
 This year's award will be announced Tuesday. 
 
 The 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize, which can be shared by as many as three people, is decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. 
 
 Last year's physics prize went to three Americans who used abstruse theory and ingenious equipment design to detect the faint ripples in the universe called gravitational waves. 
 
 On Monday, American James Allison and Japan's Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel medicine prize for groundbreaking work in fighting cancer with the body's own immune system. 
 
 The Nobel chemistry prize comes Wednesday, followed by the peace prize on Friday. The economics prize, which is not technically a Nobel, will be announced Oct. 8. ||||| Image copyright Uni Waterloo Image caption Dr Strickland shared the prize for discoveries in laser physics 
 
 The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a woman for the first time in 55 years. 
 
 Donna Strickland, from Canada, is only the third woman winner of the award, along with Marie Curie, who won in 1903, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who was awarded the prize in 1963. 
 
 Dr Strickland shares this year's prize with Arthur Ashkin, from the US, and Gerard Mourou, from France. 
 
 It recognises their discoveries in the field of laser physics. 
 
 Dr Ashkin developed a laser technique described as optical tweezers, which is used to study biological systems. 
 
 Drs Mourou and Strickland paved the way for the shortest and most intense laser pulses ever created. They developed a technique called Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA). It has found uses in laser therapy targeting cancer and in the millions of corrective laser eye surgeries which are performed each year. 
 
 Speaking to the BBC, Dr Strickland said it was "surprising" it had been such a long time since a woman had won the award. 
 
 However, she stressed that she had "always been treated as an equal", and that "two men also won it with me, and they deserve this prize as much if not more than me". 
 
 Image copyright Reuters Image caption Arthur Ashkin and Gerard Mourou were honoured for their contributions to the field 
 
 The award comes a few days after a physicist gave a "highly offensive" lecture at the Cern particle physics laboratory in Geneva in which he said that physics had been "built by men" and that male scientists were being discriminated against. 
 
 He has since been suspended by the research centre. 
 
 Dr Strickland called the physicist's remarks "silly" and said she never took such comments "personally". 
 
 The last woman to win the physics prize, German-born American physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer, took the award for her discoveries about the nuclei of atoms. 
 
 Polish-born physicist Marie Curie shared the 1903 award with her husband Pierre Curie and Antoine Henri Becquerel for their research into radioactivity. 
 
 The award is worth a total of nine million Swedish kronor (£770,686; $998,618). 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie 
 
 Reacting to her win, Dr Strickland, who is based at the University of Waterloo in Canada, said: "First of all you have to think it's crazy, so that was my first thought. And you do always wonder if it's real. 
 
 "As far as sharing it with Gerard, of course he was my supervisor and mentor and he has taken CPA to great heights so he definitely deserves this award. And I'm so happy Art Ashkin also won." 
 
 She added: "I think that he made so many discoveries early on that other people have done great things with that it's fantastic that he is finally recognised." 
 
 In a statement, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) offered its congratulations to all the winners, adding: "The countless applications made possible by their work, like laser eye surgery, high-power pettawat lasers, and the ability to trap and study individual viruses and bacteria, only promise to increase going forward. 
 
 "It is also a personal delight to see Dr Strickland break the 55-year hiatus since a woman has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, making this year's award all the more historic." 
 
 Image copyright SPL Image caption Mourou and Strickland's technique has found several applications, including in laser eye surgery 
 
 What is the work that has won a Nobel? 
 
 Before Dr Strickland and Dr Mourou's pioneering work, the peak power of laser pulses was limited because, when cranked up to high intensities, they would destroy the material used for amplifying its energy. 
 
 To get round this, the researchers first stretched the laser pulses in time to reduce their peak power, then amplified them and finally compressed them. 
 
 When a laser pulse is compressed in time and becomes shorter, more light is packed into a small space. This dramatically increases the intensity of the pulse. 
 
 Dr Strickland and Dr Mourou's technique, called chirped pulse amplification (CPA), became standard for high intensity lasers. 
 
 Arthur Ashkin realised an old dream in science fiction - using the radiation pressure of light to move physical objects. In doing so, he invented the optical tweezers that are today used to grab particles, atoms, viruses and living cells with their laser-based pincers. 
 
 He first worked on getting laser light to push small particles towards the centre of the beam and hold them there. 
 
 Then, in 1987, he used the tweezers to capture living bacteria without harming them. The technique is now used widely to study the machinery of life. 
 
 Follow Paul on Twitter. 
 
 Previous winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics 
 
 Image copyright S.Ossokine/A.Buonanno (MPI Gravitational Physics) Image caption A computer simulation of gravitational waves radiating from two merging black holes 
 
 2017 - Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish earned the award for the detection of gravitational waves. 
 
 2016 - David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz shared the award for their work on rare phases of matter. 
 
 2015 - Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald were awarded the prize the discovery that neutrinos switch between different "flavours". 
 
 2014 - Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura won the physics Nobel for developing the first blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs). 
 
 2013 - Francois Englert and Peter Higgs shared the spoils for formulating the theory of the Higgs boson particle. 
 
 2012 - Serge Haroche and David J Wineland were awarded the prize for their work with light and matter. ||||| Tweet with a location 
 
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– Three scientists from the United States, France, and Canada have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for advances in laser physics, including the first woman to take home the prize in 55 years. The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences on Tuesday awarded half the $1.01 million prize to Arthur Ashkin of the United States, and the other half will be shared by Gerard Mourou of France and Donna Strickland of Canada, per the AP. Strickland is the third female laureate in physics, but the first in more than half a century, reports the BBC. The academy says Ashkin developed "optical tweezers" that can grab tiny particles such as viruses without damaging them. As the Guardian notes, "this means scientists can hold even living cells in place, allowing them to probe their inner workings." Strickland and Mourou helped develop short and intense laser pulses that have broad industrial and medical applications. The Nobel panel's explanation: "Ultra-sharp laser beams make it possible to cut or drill holes in various materials extremely precisely—even in living matter. Millions of eye operations are performed every year with the sharpest of laser beams." (A CERN scientist just got suspended for saying physics was built by men.)