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Arthur Ashkin. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018. Born: 2 September 1922, New York, NY, USA. Died: 21 September 2020, Rumson, NJ, USA. Affiliation at the time of the award: Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ, USA. Prize motivation: “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems”. Prize share: 1/2.

Arthur Ashkin, (born September 2, 1922, New York City, New York—died September 21, 2020, Rumson, New Jersey), American physicist who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of optical tweezers, which use laser beams to capture and manipulate very small objects.

Arthur Ashkin is considered by many to be the father of laser trapping of particles using radiation pressure. In 1970, at the age of 47, Arthur published the first observation that radiation pressure from lasers can “trap” transparent dielectric spheres . It was the dawn of laser optical trapping.

Art Ashkin and his wife, Aline, have been happily married for almost 65 years. They met at Cornell, on the shore of Lake Cayuga. She was on a Cornell Outing Club excursion and he was occupied with his prospector’s pick, splitting rocks of shale looking for fossils.

Arthur Ashkin, Ph.D. ’52, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2018 for pioneering “optical tweezers” that use laser light to capture and manipulate microscopic particles, died Sept. 21 at his home in Rumson, N.J. He was 98.