Arthur Ashkin is an American scientist and Nobel laureate who worked at Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies. Ashkin has been considered by many as the father of optical tweezers, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 at age 96, becoming the oldest Nobel Laureate until 2019 when John B. Goodenough was awarded at 97. He resides in Rumson, New Jersey. Ashkin started his work on manipulation of microparticles with laser light in the late 1960s which resulted in the invention of optical tweezers in 1986. He also pioneered the optical trapping process that eventually was used to manipulate atoms, molecules, and biological cells. The key phenomenon is the radiation pressure of light; this pressure can be dissected down into optical gradient and scattering forces.
Early life and family
Arthur Ashkin was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1922, to a family of Ukrainian-Jewish background. His parents were Isadore and Anna Ashkin. He had two siblings, a brother, Julius, also a physicist, and a sister, Ruth. One older sibling, Gertrude, died while young. The family home was in Brooklyn, New York, at 983 E 27 Street. Isadore had immigrated to the United States from Odessa, at the age of 18. Anna, five years younger, also came from today's Ukraine, then Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire. Within a decade of his landing in New York, Isadore had become a U.S. citizen and was running a dental laboratory at 139 Delancey Street in Manhattan. Ashkin met his wife, Aline, at Cornell University, and they have been married over 60 years with three children and five grandchildren. She was a chemistry teacher at Holmdel High School, and their son Michael Ashkin, is an art professor at Cornell University.
Education
Ashkin graduated from Brooklyn's James Madison High School in 1940. He then attended Columbia University and was also a technician for Columbia's Radiation Lab tasked with building magnetrons for U.S. military radar systems. Although he was drafted in his second year during World War II, his status was changed to enlisted reserves, and he continued working in the Columbia University lab. During this period, by Ashkin's own account, three Nobel laureates were in attendance. Ashkin finished his course work and obtained his BS degree in physics at Columbia University in 1947. He then attended Cornell University, where he studied nuclear physics. This was during the era of the Manhattan Project, and Ashkin's brother, Julius Ashkin, was successfully part of it. This led to Arthur Ashkin's introduction to Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman and others who were at Cornell at the time. He received his PhD degree at Cornell University in 1952, and then went to work for Bell Labs at the request and recommendation of Sidney Millman, who was Ashkin's supervisor at Columbia University.
On October 2, 2018, Arthur Ashkin was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on optical trapping, sharing it with Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou who received the other half of that year's prize. Ashkin "was honoured for his invention of 'optical tweezers' that grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells with their laser beam fingers. With this he was able to use the radiation pressure of light to move physical objects, 'an old dream of science fiction', the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said." Ashkin was awarded half of the Prize while the other half was shared between Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for their work on chirped-pulse amplification, a technique "now used in laser machining enables doctors to perform millions of corrective laser eye surgeries every year". At 96, Ashkin was the oldest Nobel Prize laureate to be awarded the prize, until John B. Goodenough received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 at the age of 97.
