Stockholm, Oct 4 (BUS): Three scientists jointly won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their work in quantum information science that has important applications, for example in the field of cryptography.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger for discovering how invisible particles, such as photons or small pieces of matter, can be linked, or “entangled” with each other even when separated by great distances.
“Being a little bit clingy is kind of like being a little bit pregnant. The effect grows on you,” Clauser said in a Tuesday morning phone interview with The Associated Press.
It all comes down to a feature of the universe that puzzled Albert Einstein that even connects matter and light in an intricate and chaotic manner.
Clauser, 79, received his award for a 1972 experiment that helped settle a famous debate on quantum mechanics between Einstein and famed physicist Niels Bohr. Einstein described “terrifying action at a distance” that he thought would eventually be refuted.
“I was betting on Einstein,” Clauser said. “But unfortunately I was wrong, Einstein was wrong, and Bohr was right.”
Clauser said his work on quantum mechanics shows that you can’t confine information to a closed volume, “like a little box on your desk”—although he can’t pinpoint the cause.
“Most people assume that nature is made of matter dispersed across space and time,” Clauser said. “It appears that this is not the case.”
David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said that quantum entanglement is about taking these two photons and then measuring one here and instantly knowing something about the other here.
“And if we have this property of entanglement between the two photons, we can create information shared by different observers of these quantum objects. This allows us to do things like covert communications, in ways that couldn’t be done before.”
This is why quantitative information is not an esoteric thought experiment, said Eva Olson, a member of the Nobel Committee. She described it as a “vibrant and evolving field”.
“It has broad and potential implications in areas such as secure information transmission, quantum computing, and sensor technology,” Olson said. “Her predictions have opened doors to another world, and they have shaken the foundations of how to interpret measurements.”
Everything in the universe can be entangled but “typically entanglement is just a kind of washout. It’s very chaotic and random when you look at it,” said Subir Sachdev, a professor at Harvard University, who has worked on experiments looking at a quantum entanglement made up of 200 atoms. …we see nothing.
But sometimes scientists can decipher just enough to make sense and be useful with everything from coding to superconductors, he said.
Speaking on the phone at a press conference after the announcement, Zeilinger said he was “still somewhat shocked” to hear he had been awarded the award.
“But it’s a very positive shock,” said Zeilinger, 77, who works at the University of Vienna.
Closer, Aspect and Tessellinger have been prominent in Nobel’s speculation for more than a decade. In 2010 they won the Wolf Prize in Israel, which is seen as a possible precursor to the Nobel Prize.
While physicists often tackle problems that at first glance seem a far cry from everyday concerns — tiny particles and the vast mysteries of space and time — their research provides the foundations for the many practical applications of science.
The Nobel Committee said Clauser first developed quantum theories in the 1960s in a practical experiment. Aspect, 75, was able to fill in a loophole in those theories, while Zeilinger demonstrated a phenomenon called quantum teleportation that actually allows information to be transmitted over distances.
“By using entanglement, you can transmit all the information that an object carries. to somewhere else where the body is being reshaped, so to speak,” Zeilinger said. He added that this only works with small particles.
“It’s not like in the Star Trek movies (where there is) moving something, definitely not a person, some distance,” he said.
When he began his research, Zeilinger said the experiments were “completely philosophical with no potential use or application.”
Since then, the laureates’ work has been used to advance the fields of quantum computers, quantum networks, and secure quantum cryptographic communication.
A week of Nobel Prize announcements began on Monday with Swedish scientist Svante Papau receiving a prize in medicine on Monday for revealing the secrets of Neanderthal DNA that provided key insights into our immune system.
They continue chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Economics Prize on October 10.
The prizes carry a cash prize of 10 million Swedish kronor (approximately $900,000) and will be awarded on December 10. The money comes from a will left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.