The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for breakthroughs in quantum mechanics

The physicists honored Tuesday have found experimental ways to confirm what was previously assumed, including the “entanglement” of photons (particles of light) in a phenomenon that Albert Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance.” As the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Tuesday: “What happens to one particle in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other, even if they are too far apart to affect each other. Laureates’ development of experimental tools has laid the foundation for a new era of quantum technology.”

For Closer, the honor was a long time coming.

“This is all for the work I’ve been doing for over 50 years,” he said, visibly elated Tuesday morning when I arrived at his house.

As a graduate student at Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1969, “I was struggling to try to understand quantum mechanics, but to no avail. I didn’t understand what I didn’t understand,” he said.

But then he came across research by physicist John Bell that suggested that quantum theory and a competing set of theories, known as “hidden variables,” were inconsistent with one another. Closer thought: “If there is a difference between the two, it must be testable.”

After Closer moved to UC Berkeley, he and his colleagues searched storage rooms for supplies, finding “junk hanging in the physics department” and cutting metal in a shop. “We didn’t have any money to spend, so we had to build everything from scratch ourselves,” he said. The result was a 30-foot-long device that could send photons — particles of light — in opposite directions.

In 1972, Clauser and doctoral student Stuart Friedman — who died in 2012 — reported that their experiment revealed entanglement consistent with predictions of quantum mechanics, according to the academy.

Clauser said he was surprised by the result, which contradicted Einstein’s views on quantum mechanics.

“Einstein assumed that nature consists of things, distributed throughout space, including bits of information and the like. This seems very reasonable. In fact, general relativity is based on it. What experiments show is that this is not true,” Clauser said. You cannot localize bits of information in a small, finite volume. This simple result then has applications extending to quantum cryptography and other forms of quantum information theory.”

closeer He said he had not been contacted by officials from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences when the Washington Post called, And that he learned of the award from a “fan” who continued his work over the years. This was followed by a series of media interviews. Traditionally, no advance notice is given to Nobel Prize recipients and they are contacted by phone just prior to the announcement.

Zelinger received a call about an hour before the announcement.

“I’m still kind of shocked,” Zeilinger said during a press conference at the academy.

When a reporter asked him if it was possible, in 10,000 years, to move one’s body to another location, he replied that teleportation of people is “science fiction”.

Closer echoed this in his interview with The Post: “I wouldn’t step into a quantum teleporter, if it were available.”

Quantum mechanics is a field of physics that dates back more than a century and has yielded applications, including transistors and lasers, that people use in everyday life. But the potential applications of quantum mechanics principles seem limitless.

As a doctoral student, Aspect improved the efficiency and clarity of previous experiments by Clauser, the academy said, then Zellinger explored systems using more than two entangled particles. The three new Nobel Prize winners have been honored as triples before, having won the Israel Wolf Prize in Physics in 2010.

Eva Olson, a professor of experimental physics and a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said Tuesday that quantum information science is a rapidly developing field with many potential applications in information transmission and sensor technology.

“Her predictions opened doors to another world, and they shook the foundations of how to interpret measurements,” she said.

The honor given to the three physicists has been praised by fellow physicist Stephen Bartlett of the University of Sydney, who is the principal editor of the American Physical Society’s journal PRX Quantum.

Bartlett said in an email that the experiments “highlighted the most striking and challenging aspects of quantum physics.” “Specifically, they show that ‘entangled’ quantum particles behave in a way that is completely contrary to our notions of how independent and separate objects behave.”

Quantum theory may be strange and known to be mysterious, but it is a foundation of modern physics.

Francis Hellmann, President of the American Physical Society and Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, The Nobel laureates said they bolstered the theory through rigorous experiments conducted early in their careers. “This work is now inspiring young people around the world to work on fundamental quantum mechanics and its applications,” she said.

At the press conference in Stockholm, “The award would not be possible without the more than 100 young people who have worked with me over the years,” Zeilinger said.

Thors Hans Hansson, a theoretical physicist and a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, told reporters that the groundbreaking experiments “showed us that the strange world of entanglement and Bell pairs is not just a small world of atoms, and certainly not the virtual world of science fiction or mysticism, but the real world in which we all live.” “.

The Academic Physics award tends to rotate across many disciplines within the sprawling institution of physics, covering topics as diverse as subatomic particles and the origin of the universe. last year, The award focused on climate change. He went to Ciocoro Manabi of the United States and Klaus Haselmann of Germany to research the influence of man on climate, and Giorgio Baresi, an Italian theorist whose work described the fluctuation of systems at different physical scales.

in 2020, Black holes were the focus The Academy, which awarded prizes to astrophysicist Andrea Geis of the United States and Reinhard Genzel of Germany, as well as to British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.