East Bay physicist and two other physicists win Nobel Prize for work on quantum science

David Keaton and Frank Jordans

Stockholm — Three scientists have jointly won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. For example, research on quantum information science, which has important applications in the field of cryptography.

Frenchman Alan Aspect, American John F. Crowther, and Austrian Anton Seilinger reported by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that invisible particles, such as photons or small pieces of matter, are associated with each particle. In other words, it was cited as discovering a way to “entangle”. Others, even if they are far away.

“Being a little bit tangled is like being a little bit pregnant. It’s going to affect you,” Krauser said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press Tuesday morning.

It all goes back to the features of the universe that connected matter and light in a tangled and chaotic way that baffled even Albert Einstein.

Krauser, 79, won the prize for his 1972 experiment that helped settle the famous dispute over quantum mechanics between Einstein and the famous physicist Niels Bohr. Einstein described “distant and macabre behavior” that he thought would eventually be disproved.

“I was betting on Einstein,” Crowther said. “Unfortunately, I was wrong, Einstein was wrong, and Bohr was right.”

Crowther said his work on quantum mechanics shows that information cannot be confined in a closed volume “like a little box on a desk,” because he I don’t even know.

“Most people assume that nature is made up of things distributed throughout space and time,” Crowther said. “And it doesn’t seem so.”

Quantum entanglement “is about taking these two photons, measuring one here, and immediately knowing something about the other photon here,” says the Nobel Committee on Physics. chairman David Haviland said. “And with this property of entanglement between two photons, it is possible to establish common information between his two different observers of these quantum objects in a way that was not possible before. can be used for secret communications, etc.

So quantum information is not an esoteric thought experiment, says Nobel Committee member Eva Olsson. She called it “a vibrant and developing field”.

“There are broad potential implications in areas such as secure information transfer, quantum computing and sensing technologies,” Olsson said. “That prediction opened the door to another world and shook the very foundations of how we interpret measurements.”

Everything in the universe can be entangled, but “usually the entanglement is washed away. It’s so chaotic and random that when you look at it…we see nothing,” he says, up to 200. said Harvard University professor Subir Sachdev, who has been working on experiments looking at quantum entangled matter made up of atoms of . But scientists have unlocked enough information to make sense of it, and it could be useful for everything from encryption to superconductors, he said.

Speaking by phone at a press conference after the announcement, Seilinger said he was “still a little shocked” to hear of the award.

“But this is a very positive shock,” said Zeilinger, 77, who is based at the University of Vienna.

Krauser, Aspect, and Seilinger have been in Nobel Prize speculation for over a decade. In 2010 he won the Wolf Prize in Israel and is considered the predecessor of the Nobel Prize.

Physicists often grapple with problems that at first glance seem far removed from everyday concerns, such as small particles or the vast mysteries of space and time, but their work has many practical applications of science. provides the basis for

The Nobel Committee said Krauser had developed a quantum theory proposed in the 1960s into a practical experiment. Aspect 75 was able to plug loopholes in these theories, but Seilinger demonstrated a phenomenon called quantum teleportation that could effectively transmit information over distance.

“With entanglement, you can transfer all the information carried by an object to another place where that object is reconfigured, so to speak,” says Zeilinger. He added that this only works for small particles.

“It’s not like a Star Trek movie, it certainly carries something far, not people,” he said.

When he began his research, Seilinger said the experiment was “totally philosophical, with no possibility of use or application at all.”

Since then, the laureate’s research has been used to develop the fields of quantum computers, quantum networks and secure quantum cryptographic communications.

The week of Nobel Prize announcements kicked off on Monday, with Swedish scientist Svante Paabo receiving a medical award Monday for unlocking the secrets of Neanderthal DNA, which provides key insights into our immune system. .

Chemistry on Wednesday and Literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics prize will be announced on his October 10th.

The prize will be handed out on December 10th, with a cash prize of 10 million Swedish kronor (approximately $900,000). The prize money comes from a bequest left by its creator, the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.

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The Jordans reported from Berlin. Seth Borenstein contributed from Kensington, Maryland and Maddie Burakoff from New York.

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