After being awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine Svante Paabo for his discoveries on the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution, today it is the turn of the Nobel Prize in Physics, which went to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing violations of Bell’s inequalities, and pioneering quantum computer science”
The announcement took place at 11:45 CEST, with Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm. Although they were not part of the pools, which even included the name of the Spaniard Juan Ignacio Chirac this year, the award received the support of the scientific community, which believes that, indeed, Aspect, Wlauser and Zeilinger deserve to belong 10 million SEK (985,700 euros), which provided the prize.
Unfortunately, and despite this, his name is not added to the list women win the Nobel Prize in Physics, which still has only four: Marie Curie, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Donna Strickland and Andrea M. Ghez. There are others, like Jocelyn Bell, who should have been on the list but never made it. Although that’s a different story.
Why does quantum information deserve the Nobel Prize in Physics?
Thanks to the conclusions of the winners Nobel Prize in Physicsit is supposed to use “special properties of individual systems of particles to construct quantum computersimprove measurements, build quantum networks, and establish secure communications with quantum encryption.”
These studies are based on studies of what is known as quantum entanglement. This phenomenon occurs when two particles are in the same quantum state, no matter how far apart they are. That is, knowing the state of one, you can automatically find out the state of the other. And this is very useful, because it allows you to find new ways of storing, transmitting and processing information.
This is something that remains to be explored. However, it can be studied thanks to the work of each of the three Nobel Prize winners in physics.
On the one hand, we have John Clauser, who built a device that emitted two entangled photons at the same time, each firing at a filter that tested its polarization. The results coincided with the predictions of quantum mechanics.
Secondly, Alain Aspect managed to “change the measurement setting after the interlaced pair has left its source”. Thus, the configuration that existed when they were released could not affect the result.
Finally, Anton Zeilinger demonstrated a phenomenon called quantum teleportation. This allows you to move the quantum state from one particle to another at a distance. And this is very interesting, because it could allow the creation of quantum computer networks capable of transmitting information at ultra-high speeds.
Source: Hiper Textual
