A trio of physicists, Alain Aspect of France, John Clauser of the United States and Austria's Anton Zeilinger, on Tuesday won the Nobel Prize for discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics that have paved the way for quantum computers and secure encrypted communication.
The official statement from the Nobel physics committee is not an easy read.
The trio were honoured "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science." Good work.
The committee helpfully explains entangled quantum states as "where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated," adding that the "results have cleared the way for new technology based upon quantum information."
"It has become increasingly clear that a new kind of quantum technology is emerging," Anders Irback, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement.
'Beam me up Scotty'
Clauser, a research physicist based in California, and Aspect, professor at the Université Paris-Saclay, were singled out for their developments of the work of John Stewart Bell, who in the 1960s "developed the mathematical inequality that is named after him".
Zeilinger, a professor of physics at the University of Vienna, was highlighted for his work on "quantum teleportation, which makes it possible to move a quantum state from one particle to another one at a distance," the jury said.
"It is not like in the 'Star Trek' films or whatever. Transporting something - certainly not the person - over some distance.
But the point is, using entanglement you can transfer all the information which is carried by an object over to some other place where the object is reconstituted," Zeilinger said.
Last year, the physics prize went to Syukuro Manabe, of Japan and the United States, and German Klaus Hasselmann for their research on climate models, while Italian Giorgio Parisi also won for his work on the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems.
Only four women - Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), Donna Strickland (2018) and Andrea Ghez (2020) have won the Nobel Physics Prize since the award was instituted in 1901.
Marie Curie in 1911 won the chemistry award, becoming the only person in history to win the Nobel Prize twice.
