Nobel Prize in Physics 2022

Oct. 5, 2022

Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science".

About:

  • Two of the laureates—John Clauser and Alain Aspect—worked on firming up the concept of quantum entanglement and developing more complex experiments that demonstrated this phenomenon, especially creating, processing and measuring what are called Bell pairs. The third laureate, Anton Zeilinger, has been chosen for his innovative use of entanglement and Bell pairs both in research and application such as quantum cryptography.

Significance:

  • Quantum information science has a broad range of potential implications in areas such as secure information transfer, quantum computing and sensing technology.
  • One of the most mature applications of quantum technology is quantum cryptography, which takes advantage of the fact that changes made to one particle in an entangled system affect the other.

Quantum entanglement

  • It is a phenomenon by which a pair of particles, say photons, are allowed to exist in a shared state where they have complementary properties, such that by measuring the properties of one particle, you automatically know the properties of the other particle. This is true regardless of how far apart the two particles are transported.
Source : The Hindu