The story so far: On October 4, the Nobel Committee of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the names of three physicists as the laureates for the Nobel Prize in physics. They are Alain Aspect from the University of Paris-Saclay, France; John F. Clauser of John F. Clauser and Associates, California, U.S.; 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 given out by the Academy of Sciences, which is based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Why were these three physicists chosen for the award?
The prize has been given for experimental work in quantum entanglement, which Einstein referred to as ‘spooky action at a distance’. John Clauser and Alain Aspect firmed up this concept, developing more and more complex experiments that demonstrated and established that entanglement was indeed a true characteristic of quantum mechanics. They did this by creating, processing and measuring what are called Bell pairs. Anton Zeilinger innovatively used entanglement and Bell pairs, both in research and in applications. These include quantum computation and quantum cryptography.
