Nobel Prize 2022 Resources

Alain Aspect 

Alain Aspect was born in 1947 in Agen, France, and studied at the École Normale Supérieure for Technical Education and at the Faculty of Sciences of Orsay at the University of Paris from 1965 to 1969. He earned a license in physics in 1967 and a diploma for advanced studies in optics in 1968. In 1969 he became an associate professor of physics at the Faculty of Sciences at Orsay and in 1971 defended his 3rd cycle thesis. From 1971 to 1974 he did his national service as a teacher in Cameroon, and on his return became an assistant professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Cachan. He completed his Ph.D. in 1983 with Philippe Grangier and Jean Dalibard and then in 1985 became the deputy laboratory director at the Collège de France. In 1992 Aspect founded the atomic optics group at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he is currently the Augustin Fresnel Professor at Institut d’Optique Graduate School and a distinguished scientist emeritus at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.  He has also been a professor at the École Polytechnique from 1994 up to the present. 

In 1982 Aspect tested Bell’s inequalities for pairs of entangled photons, closing a possible locality loophole. Then in 1986, with Philippe Grangier, he demonstrated wave-particle duality for a single photon. Since then, he has worked on the laser cooling of atoms, Bose-Einstein condensates, and quantum optics.  

Alain Aspect has won the 1999 Max Born Award, 2011 Herbert Walther Award, and 2013 Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus W. Quinn Prize from Optica, and in 2000 was named a Fellow of Optica. 

John F. Clauser 

John F. Clauser was born in Pasadena, California, in 1942.  He obtained his Bachelor’s degree at the California Institute of Technology in 1964, followed by his Master’s in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1969, both from Columbia University. Following his Ph.D., he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley. From 1975 to 1986 he was a Research Physicist and Group Leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, then a Senior Scientist at Science Applications International Corporation, and finally a Research Physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. Briefly in the 1980s and then from 1997 until the present he has been a Research Physicist, Consultant, and Inventor at J. F. Clauser & Associates. 

Throughout his career, John Clauser has worked on interferometry and quantum theory. In 1969 with Michael Horne, Abner Shimony, and Richard Holt, he proposed the first experimental test of Bell’s Theorem and in 1972 carried out the first experiment with Stuart Freedman to demonstrate a violation of Bell’s inequality. Over the course of the 1970s, Clauser continued to introduce additional constraints on Bell’s theorem including tests of local realism. In the 1980s and 1990s he developed and patented atom interferometers. 

Together with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger, John F. Clauser won the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2010. 

Anton Zeilinger 

Anton Zeilinger was born in Reid im Innkreis, Austria, in 1945. From 1963 onward he studied physics and mathematics at the University of Vienna, earning his doctorate in 1971 under Helmut Rauch and staying to continue work as a research assistant at the Atominstitut Vienna. Briefly from 1977 to 1978 Zeilinger was a Fulbright Fellow at MIT where he worked under Clifford Shull. Returning to Austria, Zeilinger became an Assistant Professor at Atominstitut Vienna. From 1983 to 1990 Zeilinger worked as an Associate Professor at the Vienna University of Technology and then subsequently as Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck from 1990-1999. He has held visiting appointments at multiple universities including MIT, the Technical University of Munich, Humboldt University Berlin, Oxford University and the Chaire International at the College de France. Since 1999 he has been associated with the University of Vienna, first as a Professor of Experimental Physics and since 2013 as a Professor Emeritus. He has also served as the Director and then Senior Scientist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. 

Zeilinger is best known for his extensive work in the field of quantum information, including work on quantum communication, cryptography, computation, entanglement, interferometry, and quantum teleportation. In 1989, he discovered an entangled quantum state involving three particles with colleagues Daniel Greenberger and Michael Horne. He has since observed a four-photon entanglement and even higher dimensional quantum states. In 1997 Zeilinger conducted the first quantum teleportation of a single independent photon and in 1998 experimentally demonstrated entanglement swapping. He has also conducted multiple long-distance entanglement communication experiments. 

Anton Zeilinger won the Klopsteg Memorial Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 2004. He was also named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1999 and of Optica in 2021.