AFP UK

US physicist John Clauser poses in his home in Walnut Creek, California, on October 4, 2022, after winning the Nobel Prize for physics

American physicist John Clauser won the 2022 Nobel Prize for a groundbreaking experiment vindicating quantum mechanics — a fundamental theory governing the subatomic world that is today the foundation for an emerging class of ultra-powerful computers.

But when he carried out his work in the 1970s, Clauser was actually hoping for the opposite result: to upend the field and prove Albert Einstein had been right to dismiss it, he told AFP in an interview.

“The truth is that I strongly hoped that Einstein would win, which would mean that quantum mechanics was giving incorrect predictions,” the 79-year-old said, speaking by telephone from his home in Walnut Creek, just outside San Francisco.

Born in Pasadena in 1942, Clauser credits his father, an engineer who designed planes in the war and founded the aeronautics department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, for instilling in him a lifelong love of science. 

“I used to wander around his laboratory and say ‘Wow, oh boy, when I grow up I want to be a scientist so I can play with these fun toys too.'”

As a graduate student at Columbia in the mid-1960s, he grew interested in quantum physics alongside his thesis work on radio astronomy.

– Quantum entanglement –

According to quantum mechanics, two or more particles can exist in what’s called an entangled state — what happens to one in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other, no matter their distance.

The fact that this occurred instantly contradicted Einstein’s theory of relativity which held that nothing — including information — can travel faster than the speed of light. 

In 1935 he dismissed this element of quantum entanglement — called nonlocality — as “spooky action at a distance.” 

Einstein instead believed that “hidden variables” that instructed the particles what state to take must be at play, placing him at odds with his great friend but intellectual adversary Niels Bohr, a founding father of quantum theory.

In 1964, the Northern Irish physicist John Bell proposed a theoretical way to measure whether there were in fact hidden variables inside quantum particles. Clauser realized he could resolve the long standing Bohr-Einstein debate if he could create the right experiment.

“My thesis advisor thought it was a distraction from my work in astrophysics,” he recalled, but undeterred, he wrote to Bell, who encouraged him to take up the idea.

It wasn’t until Clauser had completed his doctorate and taken up a job at UC Berkeley that he was actually able to start working on the experiment, along with collaborator Stuart Freedman.

They focused a laser on calcium atoms, making it emit particles of entangled photon pairs that shot off in opposite directions, and used filters set to the side to measure whether they were correlated.

After hundreds of thousands of runs, they found the pairs correlated more than Einstein would have predicted, proving the reality of “spooky action” with hard data.

At the time, leading lights of the field were unimpressed, said Clauser, including the renowned physicist Richard Feynman who told him the work was “totally silly, you’re wasting everybody’s time and money” and threw him out his office.

Questioning the foundation of quantum mechanics was deemed unnecessary.

– Quantum computing  –

That wasn’t the view of the Nobel committee, who awarded Clauser, Alain Aspect of France, and Anton Zeilinger of Austria the world’s most prestigious science prize for their pioneering work in advancing the field.

“It took a long time for people to realize the importance of the work,” chuckled Clauser. 

“But I suppose it is a certain vindication, everyone was telling me it was silly.”

Einstein’s theory had more appeal to Clauser than Bohr’s, which he confessed to not fully grasping.

But over time, he came to realize the true value of his and his co-winners’ experiments. Demonstrating that a single bit of information can be distributed through space is today at the core of quantum computers. 

Clauser pointed to China’s quantum-encrypted Micius communications satellite, which relies on entangled photons thousands of kilometers apart.

“We did not prove what quantum mechanics is — we proved what quantum mechanics isn’t,” he said, “and knowing what it is not then has practical applications.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari at the State Department on September 26, 2022

The United States needs to keep engaging Pakistan despite lingering distrust over Afghanistan, with investment and climate cooperation key to reducing the South Asian nation’s growing reliance on China, a study group recommended Tuesday.

The group released its findings during a visit to Washington by the head of Pakistan’s powerful military, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, a week after a trip by the civilian foreign minister, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

The study group, which did not involve the US government, included scholars and former US ambassadors to Pakistan Ryan Crocker, Cameron Munter and Robin Raphel, along with Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador in Washington.

Pakistan and the United States were partners in the Cold War and, officially, in the Afghanistan war. But American officials lost patience with Islamabad which they suspected of quietly maintaining support for the Taliban, who triumphed as US troops withdrew last year.

“Instead of allowing existing differences to define the partnership, it may be time to recognize that both sides need to understand the other’s interests so that they can then find a way to work on areas of mutual concern,” the study group said.

The United States must move beyond leveraging aid to change Pakistan’s policies, a tactic that has been a proven failure.

Islamabad, in turn, needs to accept “that all of Pakistan’s problems, especially terrorism and militancy, cannot be laid at the door of the US.”

Pakistan has forged increasingly close relations with China, triggering warnings from the United States that Beijing — seen as Washington’s key global competitor — will saddle the economically troubled nation with debt.

The study group said that after previously linking the Pakistan relationship to Afghanistan or its historic rival India, the United States should avoid now seeing ties through the lens of China.

Instead, the United States can “help build Pakistan’s capacity for transparency and compliance” on Chinese loans and can reduce reliance on China by encouraging investment by US companies and others, it said.

The United States can also focus on building climate resilience — a key challenge for Pakistan, which was recently devastated by floods.

While the United States wants to step back from Afghanistan, the study group said the need for counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan “has if anything increased” due to the loss of US intelligence assets on the ground.

“While Pakistan and the US often fail to see eye-to-eye when it comes to Afghanistan, China, or India, they do share mutual interests in seeking stability in the region, combatting the problem of extremism and averting armed conflict in nuclear South Asia,” it said.

Alain Aspect, one of three physics Nobel winners, helped pave the way for what he calls the 'second quantum revolution'

Alain Aspect, who won a long-expected Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday, not only helped prove the strange theory of quantum entanglement but also inspired a generation of physicists in his native France, according to former students and colleagues.

Quantum entanglement is the theory — famously dismissed by Albert Einstein — that when a particle is split into two, the properties of the two new particles remain connected, as if by an invisible piece of string, regardless of how far apart they are.

It remained a theory until Aspect and his team proved the phenomenon in a laboratory experiment for the first time in 1981, entangling two photons — units of light — at a distance of 12 metres (40 feet).

The experiment helped pave the way for what Aspect has called the “second quantum revolution”, which has led to a range of new technologies including quantum computing, encryption and more.

“Quantum strangeness has dominated my whole life as a physicist,” Aspect told AFP in a 2010 interview.

His experiment finally settled a debate from more than 60 years earlier between Einstein and one of the fathers of quantum physics, Denmark’s Niels Bohr. 

Bohr believed in quantum entanglement but Einstein — whose work helped predict the phenomenon — famously argued against it, calling it “spooky action at a distance”.

“Bohr wins from a certain point of view,” Aspect said in an interview published by the Nobel Foundation after his win on Tuesday.

“But Einstein wins because he spotted something extraordinary,” he added.

Aspect said he was proud to be on the same list of Nobel-winners who have “totally changed physics”.

Awarded along with Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger and John Clauser from the United States, Aspect emphasised the importance of international scientific collaboration “at a time when the world is not so nice, and where nationalism is taking over in many countries”.

– ‘Tireless teacher’ –

Aspect, the son of a teacher, was born in Agen in southwest France in 1947.

He came second in the French education physics exam, and is currently professor at Paris-Saclay University and at Ecole Polytechnique. Now 74, he is married and has two children.

Aspect has already racked up many awards, including the gold medal from France’s CNRS research institute, as well as sharing the 2010 Wolf Prize in physics with Zeilinger and Clauser.

Aspect had been expected to win the Nobel for years, with Chris Phillips, a physicist at Imperial College London, saying “the prize was long overdue”.

“It’s one of the most deserved prizes we’ve had for a while,” he added.

“We have all been waiting for this for a long time! We are very proud,” said France’s minister for higher education and research, Sylvie Retailleau, who knew Aspect from her time as a physicist.

“He is one of those mentors in physics. A whole community today works under his leadership,” said Retailleau, a former president of Paris-Saclay University.

Aspect is also a “tireless teacher” who gives acclaimed lectures, she added.

Former student Georges-Olivier Reymond, who is now the head of French start-up Pasqal which is working on developing a quantum processor, said it was “fantastic” that Aspect had won the Nobel.

“Everything I have done in my career is thanks to him,” Reymond said. 

With his experiment, “Aspect pulled off a feat that surprised us all,” Reymond said. “It was so different from what we learned at school… it inspired generations of students.”

As well as passing his passion for physics on to his students, Aspect is also a “bon vivant who will tell you all about his foie gras recipes”, Reymond said.

“I can still hear him saying, when I was just 20 years old… ‘you have to create quantum start-ups — it’s the future’,” Reymond said.

“He was right.”

Plastic waste on the banks of the polluted Las Vacas River, in Chinautla, Guatemala

Enzymes found in the saliva of wax worms can degrade one of the most common forms of plastic waste, according to research published Tuesday that could open up new ways of dealing with plastic pollution.

Humans produce some 400 million tonnes of plastic waste each year despite international drives to reduce single-use plastics and to increase recycling. 

Around a third is polyethylene, a tough plastic thanks to its structure, which traditionally requires heating or radiation before it starts to break down. 

There have been several studies showing that microorganisms can release enzymes that start the degradation process on polyethylene, but the process has until now taken months each time. 

But those contained in the saliva the wax worm moth (Galleria mellonella) can act in only a few hours, Tuesday’s research showed. 

Researcher Federica Bertocchini, an avid beekeeper, said she originally stumbled on the idea that this small caterpillar had unusual powers when storing honeycombs a few years ago.

“At the end of the season, usually beekeepers put some empty beehives in a storage room, to put them back in the field in the spring,” she told AFP. 

“One year I did that, and I found my stored honeycombs plagued with wax worms. In fact, that is their habitat.” 

Bertocchini cleaned the honeycombs and put the worms in a plastic bag.

When she returned a short time later she found the bag “riddled with holes”.

– Poured over plastics –

“That raised the question: is it the result of munching or there is a chemical modification? We checked that, doing proper lab experiments, and we found that the polyethylene had been oxidised,” she told AFP.

In her latest research Bertocchini, from Madrid’s Margarita Salas Centre for Biological Studies (CIB) and her colleagues analysed proteins in the wax worm saliva and identified two enzymes that could break polyethylene down into small polymers in only a few hours at room temperature.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications they explained how they used another worm’s saliva as a control experiment, which produced no degradation compared with the wax worm.

Bertocchini said her team were still trying to figure out precisely how the worms degraded the plastic.

While the study authors stressed that much more research was needed before Tuesday’s findings could be implemented at any meaningful scale, there were a number of possible applications.

“We can imagine a scenario where these enzymes are used in an aqueous solution, and litres of this solution is poured over piles of collected plastic in a waste management facility,” said Bertocchini, who said her team were still trying to figure out precisely how the worms degraded the plastic.

“We can also imagine small amounts that can reach more remote locations, like villages or small islands, where waste facilities are not available.” 

She said that further down the line the solution could be used in individual houses, where each family could degrade their own plastic waste.

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics winners, left to right on display: French experimental physicist Alain Aspect, US theoretical and experimental physicist John Francis Clauser and Austrian quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger

Physicists Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger developed experimental tools that helped prove quantum entanglement — a phenomenon Albert Einstein famously dismissed as “spooky action at a distance” — is real, paving the way for its use in powerful computers.

Here are mini biographies of the three scientists. 

– John Clauser –

Born in 1942, John Francis Clauser’s earliest memories were of gaping in wonder at the equipment in the lab of his father, who created the aeronautics department for Johns Hopkins, he told the American Institute of Physics in a 2002 oral history. 

An electronics buff who built some of the first computer-driven video games at high school, Clauser opted for physics at college.

In the mid-1960s, he grew interested in the ideas of quantum mechanics pioneer John Bell, who strove to better understand entanglement — when two particles behave as one and can affect each other, even at vast distances.

“I thought this is one of the most amazing papers I’ve ever read in my own life, and I kept wondering, gee, where’s the experimental evidence?”  Clauser told PBS in 2018.

Clauser believed he could test Bell’s ideas in a laboratory, but was met with widespread scorn by leading physicists of the time.

He proposed the test independently of his thesis work on radio astronomy, and carried it out with collaborators in 1972 while at UC Berkeley. 

By shining lasers at calcium atoms to emit entangled photons and measuring their properties, he was able to prove with hard data that what had defied the imagination even of the great Einstein — was true.

– Alain Aspect –

Like Clauser, Frenchman Alain Aspect was seduced by the “limpid clarity” of Bell’s theorem.

“Quantum strangeness has dominated my whole life as a physicist,” he told AFP in a 2010 interview.

As a doctoral student, Aspect built on the work of Clauser, refining the experiment to eliminate possible loopholes in its design — publishing his work in 1982.

The son of a teacher, Aspect was born in 1947 in a village in Gascony, and is currently a professor at Institut d’Optique Graduate School (Augustin Fresnel chair), in University Paris-Saclay, and at Ecole Polytechnique.

But his interest in the quantum realm stemmed from a period in his life spent away from academia — he had gone to Cameroon to complete three years of voluntary service as a teacher.

During his free time, he came across a book written by Claude Cohen-Tannoudji on the subject (Cohen-Tannoudji won the Nobel in 1997), which in turn led him to Bell.

In a phone interview with the Nobel Foundation on Tuesday, Aspect emphasized the international makeup of his co-winners — an American and an Austrian — was an important signal in the face of rising nationalism around the world.

“It’s important that scientists keep their international community at a time when… nationalism is taking over in many countries,” he said.

– Anton Zeilinger – 

Nicknamed the “quantum pope”, the physicist Anton Zeilinger, born in 1945 in Ried im Innkreis in Austria, became one of the most famous scientists in his country by succeeding for the first time in 1997 in quantum teleportation of light particles.

A success quickly compared to the “teleportation” of the television series “Star Trek.”

Using the properties of quantum entanglement for cryptography, Professor Zeilinger encrypted the first banking transaction by this means in Vienna in 2004.

In 2007, his team created entangled pairs of photons and fired one of each pair over 144 kilometers (89 miles) between the Canary Islands La Palma and Tenerife, to generate a quantum cryptographic key.

His fame comes in part from his tireless didactic talents: always keen to popularize his knowledge to the general public, he even initiated the Dalai Lama in 2012 with infectious enthusiasm.

Attached to the University of Vienna, Zeilinger corresponds in all respects to the image of the scientist: gray hair, a full beard, and small round glasses.

He had already received countless awards and did not really believe that he would one day win the Nobel. “There are so many other candidates,” he said a few years ago to the Austria Press Agency

New Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger in front of a famous picture of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue

This year’s physics Nobel prize was awarded Tuesday to three men for their work on a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, which is so bizarre and unlikely that Albert Einstein was sceptical, famously calling it “spooky”.

So how exactly does it work?

Even people with degrees in physics struggle to understand it — and some who do still find parts “hard to swallow,” said Chris Phillips, a physicist at Imperial College London.

To explain the phenomenon he used the example of a photon — “a single unit of light” — though the theory is believed to hold true for other particles.

If a photon is put through a “special crystal”, it can be split into separate photons, he told AFP.

“They’re different colours from the one you started with,” Phillips said, “but because they started from one photon, they are entangled”.

This is where it gets weird. If you measure one photon it instantly affects the other — no matter how far you separate them.

This is not supposed to happen. Einstein’s theory of relativity says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

And they are inextricably bound together. When you observe the first photon, there are even odds that it will show itself as “either up or down”, Phillips said. But if it is up, then its twin is instantly forced down, or vice versa. 

– New way to kill Schroedinger’s cat –

He extended the famous quantum thought experiment of Schroedinger’s cat, in which a hypothetical animal locked inside a box with a flask of poison remains simultaneously alive and dead — until the moment the box is opened.

For quantum entanglement, if you have two cats in two boxes, by opening one you would “kill that cat and instantaneously — on the other side of the universe — the other cat has been killed,” Phillips said.

Phillips has seen this “extremely strange thing” first hand in his laboratory, where he has two beams of photons set up.

“I can put my hand in one beam and something happens to the other beam on the other side of the room instantaneously — I see a needle flick,” he said.

“That would still be true if my laboratory was millions of miles across.”

It was the fact that this occurs instantly that bothered Einstein, who dismissed this element of quantum entanglement — called non-locality — as “spooky action at a distance” in 1935.

He instead believed that “hidden variables” must somehow be behind what was happening.

In 1964, influential physicist John Stewart Bell found a way to measure whether there were in fact hidden variables inside quantum particles.

Two decades later, French physicist Alain Aspect, who won the Nobel on Tuesday, and his team were among the first able to test Bell’s theory in a laboratory.

By testing its limits, they found that “quantum mechanics resists all possible attacks,” Aspect said in an interview published by the Nobel Foundation after his win on Tuesday.

– ‘Totally crazy’ –

In doing so, Aspect proved Einstein wrong. But he was magnanimous to history’s greatest physicist.

“I like to say that Einstein’s owes a great, great merit in raising the question,” Aspect said, adding that “non-locality does not allow you to send a useful message faster than light”.

Even Aspect finds it weird to have accepted the idea of something “totally crazy” like non-locality into “my mental images,” he said.

The other physics Nobel winners, Austria’s Anton Zeilinger and John Clauser of the US, also tested Bell’s theory, ruling out loopholes and helping pave the way for what has been called the “second quantum revolution”.

Discoveries by Zeilinger, dubbed the “quantum pope”, have shown the potential for quantum entanglement to be used in encryption, quantum teleportation and more. 

Phillips from Imperial College London has developed a prototype the size of a hi-fi sound system that uses quantum entanglement to diagnose breast cancer.

But perhaps the greatest mystery about quantum entanglement remains one that puzzled Einstein nearly a century ago: why does it occur?

“We have to be humble in the face of physics,” Phillips said, adding that it was the same as any another aspect of nature.

“It just is.”

A trio of scientists won the Nobel Physics Prize for their work in quantum mechanics

A trio of physicists on Tuesday won the Nobel Prize for discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics that have paved the way for quantum computers, networks and secure encrypted communication.

Alain Aspect of France, John Clauser of the United States and Austria’s Anton Zeilinger were honoured for “groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated”, the committee said.

“It has become increasingly clear that a new kind of quantum technology is emerging,” said Anders Irback, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

Albert Einstein and two other physicists first brought up the idea of quantum entanglement in 1935, in a thought experiment that became known as the EPR paradox. 

– ‘Spooky action’ –

It involved two or more particles that existed in an “entangled” state, which means that what happens to one determines what happens to the other. 

This occurs even if they are far apart, something Einstein dismissed as “spooky action at a distance”.

While quantum mechanics have proved the iconic physicist wrong, Aspect said Einstein still played an important role in identifying the issue.

“We must give the credit to Einstein to have raised the equation,” Aspect said in his Nobel Foundation interview.

Aspect, a professor at the Paris-Saclay University, also noted the international makeup of the group as an important signal in the face of rising nationalism around the world, which he urged the scientific community to stand against.

“It’s important that scientists keep their international community at a time when… nationalism is taking over in many countries,” he said in a phone interview with the Nobel Foundation published on YouTube.

Aspect and Clauser, a research physicist based in California, were singled out for their developments on the work of John Stewart Bell, who in the 1960s “developed the mathematical inequality that is named after him”.

First, Clauser “built an apparatus that emitted two entangled photons at a time”, through a filter to test their polarisation. 

“The result was a clear violation of a Bell inequality and agreed with the predictions of quantum mechanics,” the jury said.

Aspect then closed one loophole that meant the measurement setting did not affect the results after the entangled pair had left its source.

– ‘Second revolution’ –

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 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,” Zeilinger said.

“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.”

The physicists have been credited with paving the way towards what has been called the “second quantum revolution”.

“The first quantum revolution allowed us to have transistors, semi contactors, computers and lasers,” Mohamed Bourennane, a professor in quantum information at Stockholm University, told AFP.

“But the second revolution, which is based on superposition and entanglement, will allow us in the future to have new devices like quantum computers,” he added.

Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger were also honoured together when they received the prestigious Wolf Prize in 2010.

The three, who will share the Nobel award sum of 10 million Swedish kronor ($901,500), will receive the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the death in 1896 of scientist Alfred Nobel, who created the prizes in his last will and testament.

The scientists were congratulated by French president Emmanuel Macron, who noted Einstein’s scepticism.

“Einstein himself did not believe in quantum entanglement! Today, the promises of quantum computing are based on this phenomenon,” Macron tweeted

Last year, the academy honoured Syukuro Manabe, of Japan and the United States, and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany for their research on climate models. 

Italian Giorgio Parisi also won for his work on the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems.

The physics prize will be followed by the Nobels for chemistry on Wednesday, the highly watched literature and peace prizes on Thursday and Friday respectively, and the economics prize on Monday.

Plastic waste on the banks of the polluted Las Vacas River, in Chinautla, Guatemala

Enzymes found in the saliva of wax worms can degrade one of the most common forms of plastic waste, according to research published Tuesday that could open up new ways of dealing with plastic pollution.

Humans produce some 400 million tonnes of plastic waste each year despite international drives to reduce single-use plastics and to increase recycling. 

Around a third is polyethylene, a tough plastic thanks to its structure, which traditionally requires heating or radiation before it starts to break down. 

There have been several studies showing that microorganisms can release enzymes that start the degradation process on polyethylene, but the process has until now taken months each time. 

But those contained in the saliva the wax worm moth (Galleria mellonella) can act in only a few hours, Tuesday’s research showed. 

Researcher Federica Bertocchini, an avid beekeeper, said she originally stumbled on the idea that this small caterpillar had unusual powers when storing honeycombs a few years ago.

“At the end of the season, usually beekeepers put some empty beehives in a storage room, to put them back in the field in the spring,” she told AFP. 

“One year I did that, and I found my stored honeycombs plagued with wax worms. In fact, that is their habitat.” 

Bertocchini cleaned the honeycombs and put the worms in a plastic bag.

When she returned a short time later she found the bag “riddled with holes”.

– Poured over plastics –

“That raised the question: is it the result of munching or there is a chemical modification? We checked that, doing proper lab experiments, and we found that the polyethylene had been oxidised,” she told AFP.

In her latest research Bertocchini, from Madrid’s Margarita Salas Centre for Biological Studies (CIB) and her colleagues analysed proteins in the wax worm saliva and identified two enzymes that could break polyethylene down into small polymers in only a few hours at room temperature.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications they explained how they used another worm’s saliva as a control experiment, which produced no degradation compared with the wax worm.

Bertocchini said her team were still trying to figure out precisely how the worms degraded the plastic.

While the study authors stressed that much more research was needed before Tuesday’s findings could be implemented at any meaningful scale, there were a number of possible applications.

“We can imagine a scenario where these enzymes are used in an aqueous solution, and litres of this solution is poured over piles of collected plastic in a waste management facility,” said Bertocchini, who said her team were still trying to figure out precisely how the worms degraded the plastic.

“We can also imagine small amounts that can reach more remote locations, like villages or small islands, where waste facilities are not available.” 

She said that further down the line the solution could be used in individual houses, where each family could degrade their own plastic waste.

A trio of scientists won the Nobel Physics Prize for their work in quantum mechanics

A trio of physicists on Tuesday won the Nobel Prize for discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics that have paved the way for quantum computers, networks and secure encrypted communication.

Alain Aspect of France, John Clauser of the United States and Austria’s Anton Zeilinger were honoured for “groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated”, the committee said.

Their 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.

Aspect, a professor at the Paris-Saclay University, said the international makeup of the group was an important signal in the face of rising nationalism around the world, which he urged the scientific community to stand against.

“It’s important that scientists keep their international community at a time when … nationalism is taking over in many countries,” Aspect said in a phone interview with the Nobel Foundation published on YouTube.

– ‘Spooky action’ –

Albert Einstein and two other physicists first brought up the idea of quantum entanglement in 1935, in a thought experiment that became known as the EPR paradox. 

It involved two or more particles that existed in an “entangled” state, which means that what happens to one determines what happens to the other. This occurs even if they are far apart, something Einstein dismissed as “spooky action at a distance”.

While quantum mechanics have proved the iconic physicist wrong, Aspect said Einstein still played an important role in identifying the issue.

“We must give the credit to Einstein to have raised the equation,” Aspect said in his Nobel Foundation interview.

Aspect and Clauser, a research physicist based in California, were singled out for their developments on the work of John Stewart Bell, who in the 1960s “developed the mathematical inequality that is named after him”.

First, Clauser “built an apparatus that emitted two entangled photons at a time”, through a filter to test their polarisation. 

“The result was a clear violation of a Bell inequality and agreed with the predictions of quantum mechanics,” the jury said.

Aspect then closed one loophole that meant the measurement setting did not affect the results after the entangled pair had left its source.

– ‘Second revolution’ –

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 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,” Zeilinger said.

“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.”

The physicists have been credited with paving the way towards what has been called the “second quantum revolution”.

“The first quantum revolution allowed us to have transistors, semi contactors, computers and lasers,” Mohamed Bourennane, a professor in quantum information at Stockholm University, told AFP.

“But the second revolution, which is based on superposition and entanglement, will allow us in the future to have new devices like quantum computers,” he added.

Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger were also honoured together when they received the prestigious Wolf Prize in 2010.

The three, who will share the Nobel award sum of 10 million Swedish kronor ($901,500), will receive the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the death in 1896 of scientist Alfred Nobel, who created the prizes in his last will and testament.

Last year, the academy honoured Syukuro Manabe, of Japan and the United States, and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany for their research on climate models. Italian Giorgio Parisi also won for his work on the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems.

The physics prize will be followed by the Nobels for chemistry on Wednesday, the highly watched literature and peace prizes on Thursday and Friday respectively, and the economics prize on Monday.

A trio of scientists won the Nobel Physics Prize for their work in quantum mechanics

A trio of physicists on Tuesday won the Nobel Prize for discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics that have paved the way for quantum computers, networks and secure encrypted communication.

Alain Aspect of France, John Clauser of the United States and Austria’s Anton Zeilinger were honoured “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science,” the Physics Prize jury said in a statement.

Each scientist “conducted groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated,” the committee said, 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.

– ‘Spooky action’ –

Albert Einstein and two other physicists first brought up the idea of quantum entanglement in 1935, in a thought experiment that became known as the EPR paradox. 

It involved two or more particles that existed in an “entangled” state, which means that what happens to one determines what happens to the other — even if they are far apart, something Einstein dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.”

Clauser, a research physicist based in California, and Aspect, professor at the Universite Paris-Saclay, were singled out for their developments on the work of John Stewart Bell, who in the 1960s “developed the mathematical inequality that is named after him.”

First, Clauser “built an apparatus that emitted two entangled photons at a time,” through a filter to test their polarisation. 

“The result was a clear violation of a Bell inequality and agreed with the predictions of quantum mechanics,” the jury said.

Aspect then closed one loophole that meant the measurement setting did not affect the results after the entangled pair had left its source.

“As an experimenter, I jumped” at the opportunity, Aspect told AFP in 2010.

– Teleportation –

Zeilinger, a professor of physics at the University of Vienna, said he had not expected to be honoured.

“I was actually very surprised to get the call,” Zeilinger told a Stockholm press conference via telephone.

Zeilinger was highlighted for his work on “quantum teleportation, which makes it possible to move a quantum state from one particle to 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.

The physicists have been credited with paving the way towards what has been called the “second quantum revolution”, which opened the door to a new generation of technologies including quantum computing, information processing and even new forms of online passwords.

Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger were also honoured together when they received the prestigious Wolf Prize in 2010.

The three, who will share the Nobel award sum of 10 million Swedish kronor ($901,500), will receive the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.

Last year, the academy honoured 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.

The physics prize will be followed by the Nobels for chemistry on Wednesday, the highly-watched literature and peace prizes announced on Thursday and Friday respectively, and the economics prize on Monday.