Max Planck – the Nobel Prize factory

Ferenc Krausz received the Nobel Prize in Physics in Stockholm on December 10, 2023. For the Max Planck Society, this was the sixth consecutive prize since 2020 and the 31st Nobel Prize overall since its founding in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG). Will the series of successes continue this year?

Starting next Monday, October 7th, 2024, you can get excited again: This year’s Nobel Prizes will be announced in Stockholm on Monday with the one for Physiology or Medicine. The prize, founded by Alfred Nobel, has been awarded in a total of six categories since 1901. This year, researchers from the Max Planck Society are again possible candidates for a prize in the scientific disciplines of chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine.

A reason to celebrate

Since its founding, the Max Planck Society (including its predecessor institution, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society) has produced 31 Nobel Prize winners, most recently Ferenc Krausz from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in 2023. He accepted the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Pierre Agostini from Ohio State University (USA) and Anne L’Huillier from Lund University (Sweden). The Nobel Committee honored all three for establishing attosecond physics. An attosecond is a billionth part of a billionth of a second.

The movements of individual electrons can be tracked using laser pulses that last only a few attoseconds. This not only enables fundamental insights into the behavior of electrons in atoms, molecules and solids, but could also help, among other things, to develop faster electronic components. Ferenc Krausz is also currently working on an application for medicine: In the future, new types of blood scans could help diagnose diseases in the early stages.

Only one university was more successful

Krausz is the 31st Nobel Prize winner from the Max Planck Society, according to the Nobel Foundation’s count. In terms of Nobel Prizes in the natural sciences, the Max Planck Society is the second research institution with the most Nobel Prize winners worldwide, after the University of California and ahead of Harvard University. Since 2020, Max Planck researchers have received the award in a row, in 2020 and 2021 as double honors in two categories.

Digital Story conveys knowledge

The Max Planck Society examines the topic comprehensively in the new Digital Story “Pioneers of Knowledge. The Nobel Prize winners of the Max Planck Society. There is also a lot of information about the “Nobel System” and Nobel Week here. The story looks back a long way from the present – Richard Willstätter received the prize in 1915 as the first researcher from what was then the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, from which the Max Planck Society emerged in 1948.

Eight themed stories tell how Nobel Prize-winning research changed people’s everyday lives and how much science revolutionized the way we view the world – including the imagination about the power that research can have. Impressive examples from Max Planck history include the discovery of nuclear fission and Einstein’s theory of relativity.

On the trail of the Nobel Prize winners

Anyone who lives in Berlin and the surrounding area can also take part in a very special tour: “In the footsteps of the Nobel Prize winners”. There is hardly any other place where so many Nobel Prize winners worked at the same time as in Dahlem. Everyone who takes part in the tour learns interesting facts about their research and their fates – from Albert Einstein to Werner Heisenberg.​

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