The story so far: On October 4, The Nobel Committee announced the names of three physicists as Nobel Laureates for this year. They are Alain Aspect from the University of Paris-Saclay, France; John F. Clauser of John F Clauser and Associates, California, USA; and Anton Zeilinger, University of Vienna, Austria. They have been awarded for “experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science,” according to a press release by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prizes every year.
The award
At the heart of the award is the concept of quantum entanglement, which Albert Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” The Prize has been given for experimental work in this area. Two of the laureates—John Clauser and Alain Aspect—worked on firming up this concept 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.
