Arthur Ashkin of Bell Laboratories is the 2003 winner of The American Physical Society's Joseph F. Keithley Award. The award was given for Ashkin's theoretical and experimental contributions to the understanding of laser cooling and trapping of atoms and particles, for demonstrating the optical gradient forces on atoms and the trapping of atoms with light, and for inventing optical tweezers and showing how they can be used to measure the physical forces generated by biological molecular motors.