Illustration of the US physicist Arthur Ashkin (1922-2020). After receiving his doctorate in nuclear physics from Cornell University in 1952, Ashkin joined Bell Laboratories, where he remained for the rest of his career. He is best known for his work on optical tweezers, where beams of light are used to trap and move microscopic objects such as cells, molecules and atoms. The initial green lasers that he used damaged living cells and viruses, but by switching to infrared light he was able to use them to investigate biological systems. Ashkin was awarded a share of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work along with Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland.