The Latest: 3 receive Nobel physics prize for laser research
By Associated Press
Oct 2, 2018 5:07 AM CDT
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)

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.

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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.