Alain Aspect named Optica Honorary Member

Optica has named Alain Aspect Honorary Member. He is CNRS Senior Scientist Emeritus and Professor at Institut d’Optique Graduate School and Ecole Polytechnique. This rather rare honour recognises the major contributions of this physicist, including his experiments on quantum entanglement.

According to Optica's press release: “Aspect conducted experiments that reveal the often anti-intuitive world of quantum mechanics. From his PhD thesis in 1983, he showed that certain states of light – so-called entangled photons – yield measurements that cannot be explained by a local classical theory. In 1986, using single photons, he demonstrated the basic truth of the quamtum framework of physics: that the building blocks of reality behave simultaneously as waves and discrete particles. The following year, he began a collaboration with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji on the laser-cooling of atoms in the regime of single-photon recoil. Aspect and his group have since made major contributions to the foundations of Bose-Einstein condensation and atom optics, where atoms reveal their wave nature and can be focused, diffract, and interfere. His work has contributed to the emergence of quantum technologies, in particular quantum cryptography and quantum simulators and computers”.

>Read the full press release