The three physicists who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics are being honored for their work on quantum entanglement and its implications for a new kind of computing.
The Nobel committee rewards, in 2022, Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, we learned on October 4. The reason ? ” Experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell’s inequalities and paving the way for quantum information science. Okay, yeah, that sounds like gibberish. But, take our word for it: it can be explained very simply.
The info will be able to go faster in the computer of the future
Imagine a brother and a sister. The brother is in Canada, the sister is in France. When the sister turns on the light, the brother does the same. When the sister eats an apple, the brother does the same. When the sister coughs, the brother coughs. So on, to the nearest second, as one and the same person, without ever communicating. This situation would be impossible in our reality, they would have to coordinate by phone or message. In the quantum world, conversely, two separate particles can act in a coordinated fashion while being far apart. This phenomenon has a name: quantum entanglement.
This is what the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022 studied. But the experiments they developed advanced a field: quantum computing. Today’s computers work in bits, it’s binary, there are 0s and 1s. Thanks to quantum entanglement, we can create qubits (quantum bits): the bits no longer have to be either a 1, or a 0, they can contain more information simultaneously.
For this reason, the advances of the three physicists on the very nature of quantum entanglement are useful both for advancing knowledge in physics, but also for helping to develop quantum computers.
