The man behind 'Femtochemistry': Ahmed Zewail wins the 1999 nobel prize in chemistry

Abstract

He hails from the land of the Pharaohs; he came to the United States, like many, to seek higher education and today he is at the top of his achievements. He is Ahmed H Zewail, Linus Pauling Chair of Chemical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He has just been honoured with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on October 12, 1999, 'for his studies of the transition state of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy'. Bond formation and bond breaking are the two most fundamental concepts that make chemistry. Zewail studied these two processes using ultrashort techniques on the time scale on which they actually occur.