Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, Anton Zeilinger – 2022 Winners – Nobel Prize for Physics.
© Nobel Prize Outreach. Illustration: Niklas Elmehed. https://nobelprize.qbank.se/mb/?h=a01ac2c0632b321a715b4cd9ff2438e6
As the Nobel Prize announcement week draws to a close, one particular award is especially relevant to the readers here. Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering work in quantum information science.
Alain Aspect is from the Université Paris-Saclay and École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France, Anton Zeilinger from the University of Vienna, Austria while John F. Clauser is from Walnut Creek, California with past affiliations with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley.
At the core of it, they have established the evidence of a phenomenon in the Quantum field known as Entanglement – a state where two separated particles can link to one other even though they are not in proximity.
Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. The picture was taken at Paul Ehrenfest’s home.
Paul EhrenfestGraf at de.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Niels_Bohr_Albert_Einstein_by_Ehrenfest.jpg
Quantum’s history and its place in science had its start on the fringe and in almost a mystical corner. At the heart of it was the debate that pitted Albert Einstein and others against early Quantum Physicists such as Neil Bohr. The debate centered around two versions of Quantum reality and it took John Stewart Bell, another Physicist several years later to propose experiments that could shed some light on this subject. It is John Bell’s postulations that this year’s Nobel Prize winners were able to take further and untangle any doubts about the reality of Entanglement.
The work from these Nobel prize winners will lead to other developments. Quantum information “has broad and potential implications in areas such as secure information transfer, quantum computing and sensing technology,” said Eva Olsson, a member of the Nobel committee.
November 2022