Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, Anton Zeilinger awarded 2022 Nobel Prize: what have they discovered?

October 4, 2022  16:13

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, Anton Zeilinger “for their experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell's inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”, representatives of the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute noted during an online broadcast of the event.

The same three scientists were awarded the Wolf Prize in 2010.

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Clauser and Bell's theorem

In his works, quantum mechanics specialist John Clauser developed the ideas of physicist John Bell. According to the latter's theorem, it is possible to conduct a series of experiments, statistical results of which will confirm or deny the presence of hidden parameters in quantum-mechanical theory, regardless of real presence of such hidden parameters in it.

Gerard Hooft, Nobel Prize winner in 1999, questioned the validity of Bell's theorem based on the possibility of superdeterminism and proposed some ideas for constructing local deterministic models.

Now, with the help of experiment, this year's laureate John Clauser has shown that Bell's inequalities are violated, and therefore quantum mechanics cannot be replaced by a theory using hidden parameters.

Clauser was born in 1942 in Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, USA. From 1966-1969, he worked at Lawrence National Laboratory in Berkeley, Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of California, where he did experimental research on Bell's theorem.

Aspect and the remaining loopholes

Alain Aspect is a specialist in quantum optics, hidden parameter theory, and quantum entanglement. In his research, he closed the remaining loopholes for the possible existence of hidden parameters after the Clauser experiment, preventing the possible influence of a measurement on an entangled photon pair before it has left the source.

Aspect was born in 1947 in France. In 1983, he defended his doctoral thesis on Bell's inequalities.

He is primarily known to the scientific community for his ability to explain fundamental aspects of the quantum and mechanical behavior of single photons, photon pairs, and atoms. In addition, he contributed greatly to the understanding of the quantum world.

Zeilinger and entangled pairs

Anton Zeilinger, for his part, studied the use of entangled pairs. He and his team were able to demonstrate a phenomenon called quantum teleportation, which allows a quantum state to move from one particle to another over a distance.

Anton Zeilinger was born in Ried im Innkreis, Austria, in 1945. Since 1963, he studied physics and mathematics at the University of Vienna, and in 1971 he defended his thesis on neutron depolarization. Today he is engaged in scientific research at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Previous winners

Giorgio Parisi (Italy), Syukuro Manabe (Japan) and Klaus Hasselmann (Germany) received the Nobel Prize in 2021. Parisi was awarded for the discovery of the relationship of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales. While Manabe and Hasselmann received the prize for physical modeling of the Earth's climate, quantifying variability, and reliably predicting global warming.

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And in 2020, Roger Penrose, 89-year-old professor emeritus of mathematics at Oxford University, received the first part of the prize, while astronomers Reinhard Genzel (Germany) and Andrea Ghez (USA) shared the second part. Penrose was awarded for his discovery that the general theory of relativity reliably predicts the birth of black holes. And Genzel and Ghez were awarded for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our Galaxy.

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