Arthur Ashkin

Arthur Ashkin (September 2, 1922 – September 21, 2020) was an American physicist best known for inventing optical tweezers, a revolutionary technique that uses the radiation pressure of focused laser beams to trap and manipulate microscopic particles, atoms, viruses, and living cells without physical contact. This breakthrough, developed during his long career at Bell Laboratories, earned him half of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems," making him the oldest Nobel laureate in history at age 96.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Polish Jewish immigrant parents Isadore Ashkin and Anna Fishman, Ashkin grew up during the Great Depression and displayed an early interest in science, influenced by his father's dental practice and Brooklyn's public schools. His education was interrupted by World War II, during which he worked at Columbia University's Radiation Laboratory on microwave electronics; he later earned a B.S. in physics from Columbia University in 1947 and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1952, where his thesis focused on electron-positron scattering. Ashkin joined Bell Telephone Laboratories (later Bell Labs) in 1952 as a member of the technical staff, rising to head the Department of Laser Science from 1963 to 1987, and continued there until his retirement in 1992.

Arthur Ashkin was born on September 2, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents, Isadore and Anna Ashkin, who had fled persecution and economic hardship in Eastern Europe. His father, Isadore Ashkenazi (later Ashkin), was born in 1891 in what is now Ukraine and immigrated to the United States in 1910 at age 19, escaping Tsarist Russia; he arrived via a sealed train to Holland and steerage passage to New York, where the family name was anglicized at Ellis Island. Ashkin's mother, Anna Fishman, born in 1895 in Galicia (now part of Ukraine and Poland), immigrated as a young child around 1897, settling in the vibrant immigrant communities of New York. The parents' journeys instilled in the family a deep emphasis on education and perseverance, values that shaped Ashkin's formative years amid the challenges of immigrant life.