Highlight
- Three researchers won 10m Swedish kronor which is worth £802,000.
- The Nobel prize was given for pioneering quantum information science.
- The research laid the groundwork for complex computing and ultra-secure communications
The Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to 3 researchers for their work on quantum mechanics.
As per the official reports of the award, the Nobel prize was given for pioneering quantum information science, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and experiments with entangled photos.
These three researchers are John F Clauser,79, Anton Zeilinger, 77, and Alain Aspect, 75.
John Francis Clauser is an American experimental and theoretical physicist who is known for his contribution to the foundation of Quantum mechanics.
Anton Zeilinger is an Austrian quantum physicist and is a professor of physics emeritus at the University of Vienna and a scientist at the institute for quantum optics and quantum information of the Austrian Academy of sciences.
Zeilinger received the Isaac Newton Medal of the institute of physics, for his contribution to the foundation of quantum physics in the year 2007.
Alain Aspect is a French physicist, who is known for his work in the field of experimental work on quantum entanglement
These three researchers won 10m Swedish kronor which is worth £802,000 on Tuesday. This prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
The work of these three researchers has focused on a phenomenon which is known as quantum entanglement, which was dubbed as “spooky action at a distance” by Albert Einstein. The research is expected to play an important role in secure information transfer, quantum computing, and sensing technologies.
An experiment was conducted by these three researchers that showed a special state called “entanglement,” he says when tiny particles are linked, what happens to one determines what will happen to the others, even though they are separated by large distances.
This phenomenon cannot be explained by the typical laws of physics, as Clauser and Zeilinger showed that entanglement can teleport information between linked particles.
Quantum entanglement, in simple terms, means that the properties of one particle can be inferred by examining the properties of a second particle – even if these particles are separated by a large distance. As the academy pointed out, an easy way to explain this is by giving an example of a white and black ball – If you receive a white ball, you know the other ball is black.
As per the physicists, one possibility was that the particles might carry some secret information, that determines their properties.
Research on these three people has laid the groundwork for complex computing and ultra-secure communications, and it demonstrated quantum mechanics.
How did Bell come to this?
It was in the early 1960s, a physicist john Stewart Bell who was Irish proposed that this would be possible to test this by carrying out several runs of a particular experiment and after experiments, a theory that gave rise to what is known as Bell’s inequality.
An American physicist John Clauser, inspired by Bell’s work, conducted work with Stuart Freedman and polarized the light to show that particles do not contain secret information.
In 2002, in an interview with John at the American Institute of Physics, John remembered his thesis adviser Pat Thaddeus impressed when John first became interested in the field.