Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Alain Aspect, a Principal Investigator for the Simons Collaboration on Localization of Waves

For their work exploring “quantum weirdness” and “spooky action at a distance,” quantum physicists Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have received the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics. Aspect is a principal investigator for the Simons Collaboration on Localization of Waves.

In the prize announcement, the Nobel committee noted that the trio “have each conducted groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated. Their results have cleared the way for new technology based upon quantum information.”

Aspect is a professor at the Institut d’Optique Graduate School and Ecole Polytechnique in France. He is an experimentalist whose work focuses on basic quantum phenomena. His experimental tests of Bell’s inequalities in the 1980s settled a debate initiated by Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein a half-century earlier and gave rise to the field of quantum information science. As a principal investigator for the Simons Collaboration on Localization of Waves, Aspect continues his research on some of the most compelling puzzles in condensed matter physics.