STOCKHOLM/LONDON - A trio of American, French and Canadian scientists won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for breakthroughs in laser technology that have turned light beams into precision tools for everything from eye surgery to micro-machining.

They include the first female physics prize winner in 55 years.

Canada's Donna Strickland, of the University of Waterloo, becomes only the third woman to win a Nobel for physics, after Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963.

Arthur Ashkin of Bell Laboratories in the United States won half of the 2018 prize for inventing "optical tweezers" while Strickland shares the remainder with Frenchman Gerard Mourou, who also has US citizenship, for work on high-intensity lasers.

"Obviously we need to celebrate women physicists because we are out there and hopefully in time it will start to move forward at a faster rate," Strickland told a news conference by telephone, shortly after learning of the prize.

The Nobel prizes have long been dominated by male scientists, and none more so than physics.

Strickland is the first female Nobel laureate in any field in three years. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said last year it would seek to more actively encourage nominations of women researchers to begin addressing the imbalance.

Her win comes a day after Europe's physics research centre CERN suspended an Italian scientist, Alessandro Strumia, for telling a seminar at the organisation's Swiss headquarters last week that physics was "invented and built by men".

Jim Al-Khalili, professor of theoretical physics at Britain's University of Surrey, said on Twitter it was "delicious" that Strickland had won the Nobel prize just days after Strumia's "misogynistic" comments.

The inventions by the three scientists date back to the mid-1980s and over the years they have revolutionised laser physics.

"Advanced precision instruments are opening up unexplored areas of research and a multitude of industrial and medical applications," the academy said on awarding the nine million Swedish crown ($1 million) prize.