One of the authors of this seminal 1986 paper, Steven Chu, would go on to use optical tweezing in his work on cooling and trapping neutral atoms. This research earned Chu the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips."Interview conducted for internal newsletter at Bell Labs. Contains confirmation of Ashkin as the inventor of optical trapping and provides information on the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics."</ref> In an interview, Steven Chu described how Ashkin had first envisioned optical tweezing as a method for trapping atoms. Ashkin was able to trap larger particles (10 to 10,000 nanometers in diameter) but it fell to Chu to extend these techniques to the trapping of neutral atoms (0.1 nanometers in diameter) utilizing resonant laser light and a magnetic gradient trap (cf. Magneto-optical trap).