The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger, the Royal Academy of Sciences announced on Tuesday (October 4th).
The trio of septuagenarians is rewarded for their discoveries on quantum entanglement, a mechanism where two quantum particles are perfectly correlated, whatever the distance which separates them, announced the Nobel jury.
The demonstration of this astonishing property has paved the way for new technologies in quantum computing and ultra-secure communications, or even ultra-sensitive quantum sensors that would allow extremely precise measurements, such as that of gravity in space.
This puzzling mechanics was predicted by quantum theory. However, even Albert Einstein did not believe it: two particles joined at the start – like twins could be – could keep the mark of their common past and behave similarly, at a distance.
Affiliated to the French University of Paris-Saclay and Ecole polytechnique, Alain Aspect is 75 years old while John Clauser is 79 and Anton Zeilinger, from the University of Vienna, is 77. The trio are rewarded “for his experiments with entangled photons, establishing violations of Bell’s inequalities and opening a pioneering path to quantum computing”, according to the Nobel jury. And to continue: “Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have each conducted groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave as a single unit, even when separated. »
In 2021, climate change modeling rewarded
Awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the award was given last year to two experts in climate change modeling, the American-Japanese Syukuro Manabe and the German Klaus Hasselmann as well as the Italian Giorgio Parisi , a specialist in complex physical systems.
Like the economics prize and other science prizes, the Nobel Prize for Physics suffers from a shortage of women laureates, but few women’s names are among the speculation this year. Only four women have won in physics since the awards were established in 1901, the last being American astrophysicist Andrea Ghez two years ago.
In an interview with Agence France-Presse after a very masculine 2021 season (twelve men and one woman), the secretary general of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, Göran Hansson, described ” sad “ the low number of women laureates but rejected the idea of quotas.
The 2022 Nobel Prizes