Aspect, Clauser, and Zellinger shared the Nobel Prize for their research on quantum mechanics.
By Diksha Batra ’26
Staff Writer
On Oct. 4, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect from Université Paris-Saclay and École Polytechnique, research physicist John F. Clauser of J.F. Clauser & Associates and Anton Zeilinger from the University of Vienna for their work in the field of quantum information science.
The Nobel Prize first arose from the last wishes of Alfred Nobel, as written in his will from 1895, Nobel Prize reported. An excerpt from Nobel’s will said that the prize “shall be divided into five equal parts,” with one of those parts going to “the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics.”
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was announced at a conference hosted by Secretary General Hans Ellegren of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and Nobel Committee for Physics members Eva Olsson and Thors Hans Hansson. The Royal Swedish Academy is in charge of determining the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics each year, according to the organization.
Ellegren started the conference by introducing everyone before officially announcing the prize recipients. Olsson went on to describe the study of quantum information science as “a vibrant, rapidly developing field with broad and potential implications in areas such as secure information transfer, quantum computing and sensing technology.”
After the winners were announced, Hansson gave an overview of the research that won the Nobel Prize. The work of Aspect, Clauser and Zeinlinger demonstrated the potential to investigate and control particles that are in entangled states, he said. An article from Science Insider explains that “the tale of entanglement stretches back to 1935 and Einstein’s discontent with the contingent nature of quantum mechanics.”
Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance.” When two quantum systems known as “c-ons” are entangled, “information about one improves our knowledge of the other,” according to Quanta Magazine. “Entanglement in quantum systems arises naturally — for example, in the aftermath of particles’ collisions,” Wilczek explained.
The first teleportation experiment on entangled particles was completed in 1997 by Anton Zeilinger and his colleagues. The researchers discovered the phenomena of quantum teleportation, a “way of transferring an unknown quantum state from one particle to another,” according to the Nobel Prize website. The website then explains what happens when two particles “in an entangled pair travel in opposite directions and one of them then meets a third particle in such a manner that they become entangled.” When this occurs, the two particles “enter a new shared state. The third particle loses its identity, but its original properties have now been transferred to the solo particle from the original pair,” the website said.
According to the Nobel Prize website, Clauser “became interested in the fundamentals of quantum mechanics as a student in the 1960s.” He was fascinated with physicist John Bell’s idea that the world cannot fully be described by quantum mechanics — or “Bell’s inequality” — according to the Nobel Prize website.
Science Insider writer Adrian Cho helps explain Bell’s theory, saying, “Quantum theory states that the properties of an object such as an electron depend on how the thing is measured. Precisely measure the electron’s position and its momentum becomes uncertain and unpredictable, and vice versa. So it can have a definite position or momentum, but not both.” Einstein believed that the reason behind quantum uncertainty was that “hidden variables” predetermined these measurements. In 1964, Bell proposed a test for Einstein’s idea, stating that if two particles can be entangled “their two states are entirely correlated,” the Science Insider article said.
Clauser and three other researchers designed an experiment to test Bell inequalities. The result demonstrated “a clear violation of Bell Inequality and agreed with the predictions of quantum mechanics,” the Nobel Prize website said. Clauser and other physicists continued to discuss the experiment and its limitations. There was something missing from the experiment according to the website, as “particles could still be carrying hidden information.”
Then, Aspect “built a new version of the setup that he refined over several iterations,” according to the Nobel Prize website. “[He] closed an important loophole,” the site stated. “His research group has demonstrated a phenomenon called quantum teleportation, which makes it possible to move a quantum state from one particle to one at a distance.”
The work of these three scientists is “paving the way for the burgeoning fields of quantum communication and quantum computing,” Cho wrote. “Clauser and Aspect were able to prove quantum entanglement, and Anton showed how entanglement can be used to ‘teleport’ information from one subatomic particle to another.”
In an interview with Reuters, Caluser said that the research was his work “from more than 50 years ago” and that he is “happy to still be alive.”
Reactions to the award-winning research around the world have been extremely positive, according to Reuters. French president Emmanuel Macron congratulated the winners, saying that “Einstein himself did not believe in quantum computing based on this phenomenon.” “I’m absolutely thrilled,” Adrian Kent, a quantum physicist at the University of Cambridge, said in an interview with Science Insider. “The recognition is overdue for these giants in the field.”