(Inside Science) — The 2018 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to three scientists who took lasers to new levels.

The first half of the prize goes to Arthur Ashkin from Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems.” The second half was awarded jointly to Gérard Mourou of the École Polytechnique, Palaiseau in France, and Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo in Canada, “for their method of generating high-inte