“This is richly deserved because these are the pioneers of modern quantum physics,” he said. Prof Jeff Forshaw, a particle physicist at the University of Manchester, said the award of the prize was terrific news. The work led to Zeilinger, who is known for being a jazz-lover, being dubbed “Mr Beam”. The approach involved transferring the properties of a particle – typically a photon – across large distances to another particle. “He thought this was a terrible waste of time, and I was ruining my career,” said Clauser.Īlain Aspect, now at Université Paris-Saclay and École Polytechnique in France, came up with further experiments – these closed important loopholes that might still have allowed the hidden variables theory to explain the results.Īmong other work, Zeilinger and colleagues explored entangled systems involving more than two particles – leading to the first experiments involving quantum teleportation. In an interview with the American Institute of Physics in 2002, Clauser recalled how his former thesis adviser Pat Thaddeus was far from impressed when Clauser first became interested in the field. Instead, as predicted by quantum mechanics, which one turns black is down to chance. In other words, the balls in the scenario above do not contain hidden instructions about which colour to turn. Inspired by Bell’s work, the American physicist John Clauser, now at JF Clauser and Associates in Walnut Creek, California, conducted work with the late Stuart Freedman involving polarised light to show that particles, in this case photons, do not contain secret information. In the early 1960s, the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell proposed that it would be possible to test this by carrying out multiple runs of a particular type of experiment and looking at the way the results are correlated, a theory that gave rise to what is known as Bell’s inequality. One possibility mooted by physicists was that the particles might contain some secret information or “hidden variables”, that determine their properties. This lies at the heart of the “spookiness” – rather than “action” at a distance, the two particles, or balls, appear to be inherently connected, without the need for any signal to be sent between them. Importantly, however, the properties of each particle are not fixed until they are examined – in the ball scenario this would mean that both balls are grey until looked at, whereupon one turns white and the other black. If you receive a white ball, you know the other ball is black. As the academy pointed out, an easy way to imagine this is to think about being given one of two balls – one of which is white and the other black. Quantum entanglement, in a nutshell, means that the properties of one particle can be deduced by examining the properties of a second particle – even if they are separated by a large distance. The research is expected to play an important role in quantum computing, secure information transfer, and sensing technologies. The trio’s work has focused on a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, which was dubbed “spooky action at a distance” by Albert Einstein. With this instrument, Blackett secured the classical photographs, now familiar to many generations of physics students, showing the disintegration of nitrogen by fast α-particles and many other examples of nuclear processes.According to the official citation for the award, the prize was given “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”. The successful design and operation of this elaborate instrument, in which the many operations involved in taking a single photograph were made mechanically, in an ordered sequence many times repeated, represented a technical achievement of the highest order. ![]() ![]() For this purpose, Blackett developed the automatic expansion chamber. ![]() In order to observe the transmutation of a nitrogen nucleus, it was necessary, however, to consider making many thousands of photographs. After the discovery of the artificial transmutation of some of the light elements by Rutherford in 1919, it became important to make a detailed study of individual disintegrations, and this could only be done with the Wilson chamber. The most important of Blackett‘s contributions to experimental physics have been made with the Wilson expansion chamber. Blackett, of the University of Manchester. THE Nobel Prize for Physics, for the year 1948, has been awarded to Prof.
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