Second episode of the 2022 vintage, the Nobel Prize in Physics distinguished on Tuesday October 4 the Frenchman Alain Aspect, the American John F. Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger “for their experiments on entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell’s inequality and for pioneering quantum information”.
Aged 75, Alain Aspect is a former student of ENS Cachan and the University of Orsay. A member of several Academies of Sciences in France, Italy, the United States and Austria, Belgium and the United Kingdom, he has already received numerous prizes. He was awarded the CNRS gold medal in 2005, the Niels Bohr gold medal and the Albert Einstein medal in 2013.
His work has notably focused on testing Bell’s inequalities with pairs of entangled photons, the cooling of atoms by laser under the recoil of the photon or even ultra-cold atoms, quantum gases and quantum simulators.
BREAKING NEWS:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2022 #NobelPrize in Physics to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger. pic.twitter.com/RI4CJv6JhZ— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 4, 2022
The last Frenchman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics was Gérard Mourou in 2018 for his research on lasers which made it possible to develop high-precision tools used in industry and medicine.
Progress on climate change
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was part of the sad news of climate change. The American-Japanese Syukuro Manabe and the German Klaus Hasselmann won half the prize for their work which enabled reliable climate modeling. The other half of the Nobel Prize went to the Italian Giorgio Parisi for his advances in complex models, which again shed light on the apparent chaos of the Earth’s atmosphere.
In 2020, it was the Englishman Roger Penrose, the German Reinhard Genzel and the American Andrea Ghez who were honored for their discoveries on “black holes” and the secrets of our galaxy.
The Nobel Prizes in Science end on Wednesday October 5 with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and then give way to the long-awaited Literature Prizes on Thursday and Peace Prizes on Friday, the only ones to be awarded in Oslo. The Nobel Prize in Economics, a more recent creation, will close the ball next Monday.