The 2022 Nobel prize in physics awarded to Alain Aspect, professor at École polytechnique

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 has been awarded to Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger, announced the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The trio is rewarded for their discoveries on quantum entanglement, a mechanism where two quantum particles are perfectly correlated, regardless of the distance that separates them, explained the Nobel jury.

The discovery of this amazing property has opened the way to new technologies in quantum computing and ultra-secure communications, or ultra-sensitive quantum sensors that would allow extremely precise measurements, such as gravity in space.

Born in 1947, Alain Aspect is an alumnus of École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Cachan and the Université Paris-Saclay. He has held positions at the Institute of Optics, ENS Yaoundé (Cameroon), ENS Cachan, ENS/Collège de France, and CNRS.

He is a professor (Augustin Fresnel Chair) at the Institut d'Optique Graduate School (Université Paris-Saclay), a professor at École Polytechnique (Institut Polytechnique de Paris), and Director of Research Emeritus at the CNRS.

He is a member of several academies of science in France, the United States, Austria, Belgium and the United Kingdom.

Among many awards, he has received the CNRS Gold Medal (2005), the Wolf Prize in Physics (2010), the Balzan Prize on Quantum Information (2013), the Niels Bohr Gold Medal (2013), the Albert Einstein Medal (2013), the Ives Medal of the Optical Society of America (2013).

Alain Aspect's experimental work has included tests of Bell's inequalities with pairs of entangled photons (PhD, 1974-1983); wave-particle duality for single photons (1984-86, with Philippe Grangier); laser cooling of atoms under photon recoil (1985-1992, with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji); ultracold atoms, quantum gases and simulators.

"This Nobel Prize testifies to the excellence of education and research at École Polytechnique and the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, particularly in the field of physics, from the most fundamental work to cutting-edge applications," said Eric Labaye, president of École Polytechnique and the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, of which École Polytechnique is one of the five founding Schools.

The recognition of the importance of Alain Aspect's work by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences comes four years after it awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Gérard Mourou, also a professor at École polytechnique, and to Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo in Canada for the "Chirped Pulse Amplification" (CPA) technique developed in the 1980s.

In 2022 and for its first ranking in the QS World University Rankings by Subjects, the Institut Polytechnique de Paris was ranked among the world's top universities in eight disciplines, including Physics and Astronomy.