Let there be light. That could have been the strapline of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics, announced on Tuesday. It is apt in a literal sense: the award went to three scientists involved in laser physics.

But the Nobel committee also seems to have had a lightbulb moment and opted, with these laureates, to right several long-simmering wrongs. Half the ￡770,000 prize money went to Arthur Ashkin, formerly of Bell Labs in New Jersey, for developing optical “tweezers”. These use light to confine and handle small molecules, even single atoms. Mr Ashkin — at 96, the oldest Nobel recipient in history — is thought to have been unfairly passed over in 1997. The Nobel that year went to three other physicists, including Steven Chu, who used Mr Ashkin’s techniques to cool and trap atoms.

The other two 2018 winners, sharing the remainder equally, are Donna Strickland, from Waterloo University in Ontario, and Gérard Mourou, from the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France. Ms Strickland, an associate professor, becomes only the third woman to be awarded a physics Nobel. The first was Marie Curie in 1903; the second was Maria Goeppert Mayer, honoured in 1963 in nuclear physics.