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Ahmed Zewail Wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Date
October 1999 CE1420 AH27 years ago
Place
Pasadena, California, USA
People
Ahmed Zewail

Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian-born chemist, won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of chemical reactions using femtosecond laser spectroscopy. He was the first Egyptian and the first Arab to win a Nobel Prize in a science field. His work at Caltech created femtochemistry, which tracks atoms during a reaction on a very short timescale.

Why it matters

Femtochemistry became a standard method for observing chemical reactions as they happen.

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