2022 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 4 October 2022.

The citation

The citation reads: "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science". They share the prize equally.

The laureates

Alain Aspect was born in 1947 in Agen, France, and is affiliated with Institut d'Optique Graduate School - Université Paris-Saclay, Paris and École Polytechnique, Palaiseau. John Clauser was born in 1942 in Pasadena, the United States, and is affiliated with J.F. Clauser & Assoc., Walnut Creek. Anton Zeilinger was born in 1945 in Ried im Innkreis, Austria, and is affiliated with the University of Vienna, Vienna and Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna.

Why it matters

Their experiments with pairs of linked particles proved that quantum mechanics really does work in ways Einstein found strange, and laid the foundations for quantum technology.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.