The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this Tuesday the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics to the Frenchman Alain Aspect, to the American John Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger, for his pioneering work in the science of quantum communication. The award includes 10 million Swedish crowns, about 930,000 euros.
The three physicists have shown that it is possible to control particles in quantum entanglement, a state in which what happens to one particle determines what happens to another, despite being even miles away. In 2012, the Zeilinger team achieved “teleport a quantum state” between two intertwined photons of light separated by 143 kilometers: one was on the Canary Island of La Palma and the other on Tenerife. The tools developed by the three winners have paved the way for new quantum communication technologies and secure information encryption methods, according to has highlighted the Nobel.
The concept of entanglement is not at all intuitive. Once two elementary particles are entangled, the measurement in them of a certain physical property —such as polarization or their intrinsic moment of rotation— will coincide, without physical signals existing between them. Through one particle, information can be transferred at a distance to another.
Alain Aspect, born in Agen (France) 74 years ago, carried out his work at the Paris-Saclay University. John Clauser, born in Pasadena (USA) 79 years ago, pioneered his own company, JF Clauser & Associates. Y Anton Zeilingerborn 77 years ago in Ried im Innkreis (Austria), did his research at the University of Vienna.
The successes of the winners are based on the work of the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, who died in 1990. In 1964 Bell postulated theories that suggested that if two particles interacted at a distance, it was not due to hidden local variables. John Clauser experimentally confirmed Bell’s ideas, although he left gaps in knowledge that were filled by Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger.
Since 1901, only four of the 221 scientists awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics have been women. The French nationalized Polish Marie Curie was the first of them in 1903, for her studies on radioactivity. German-American Maria Goeppert-Mayer received the award in 1963 for her research on the internal structure of the nucleus of atoms. Canadian Donna Strickland won in 2018 for developing the most intense laser pulses ever created by mankind. And the American Andrea Ghez was awarded in 2020 for discovering a black hole in the center of the Milky Way.
In the pools this year, carried out by the specialized company Clarivate Analytics, included the Japanese Takashi Taniguchi Y Kenji Watanabefrom the National Institute of Materials Science of Japan, for the production of hexagonal boron nitride crystals, ideal as substrate on which to study other promising materials, such as graphene. The American Stephen Quake, from Stanford University, also sounded like a candidate, for his contributions to the physics of fluids on a minuscule scale, that of the nanoliter (one billionth of a liter), with multiple medical applications. Finally the German immanuel blochscientific director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics for his quantum simulation techniques, which use ultracold atoms to investigate the properties of complex materials known as artificial solids.
Last year, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Japan’s Syukuro Manabe, Germany’s Klaus Hasselmann and Italy’s Giorgio Parisi, for shedding light on the workings of complex physical systems, such as the Earth’s climate. This Monday, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced that the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine is the Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo, father of the Neanderthal genome, for his work to rescue the DNA of fossils of extinct species. This Wednesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce the winner(s) of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
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