2022-10-05 00:54:00

Prove Einstein wrong! The nobel prize in physics g

Just now, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics has been announced!

This year's physics award is awarded to three scientists of quantum entanglement, Alan Aspe Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, for their experiments with entangled photons, proving that Bell inequality is not tenable, and thus creating quantum information science.

In other words, they succeeded in proving Einstein wrong.

Prove Einstein wrong! The nobel prize in physics goes to quantum entanglement

The three of them will share a prize of SEK 10 million. It is worth mentioning that Salinger is also the doctoral supervisor of Academician Pan Jianwei.

proved that Einstein was wrong

said in the official evaluation that their experiments laid the foundation for the current quantum technology revolution and really promoted quantum information from theory to application. The key contribution of

is to prove that Bell inequality is not tenable by quantum entanglement experiment.

quantum entanglement means that when two separated particles or multiple particles interact with each other, the properties of each particle have been integrated into a whole property, and it is impossible to describe the properties of each particle separately.

Prove Einstein wrong! The nobel prize in physics goes to quantum entanglement

This phenomenon was first discovered in 1935, including Einstein. Schr ö dinger also published several related papers and defined the term quantum entanglement.

But this behavior was denounced by Einstein as a violation of local realism, He also ridiculed quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance" and said, "I believe God does not roll dice. He said that the standard formulation of quantum mechanics is not complete.

In the 1960s, Bell put forward a paper that showed that there was a contradiction in Einstein's local realism, on the contrary, the correlation results obtained by quantum mechanics were much stronger. At the same time, Bell inequality is proposed to characterize the difference.

In classical mechanics, this inequality holds, while in quantum mechanics, this equation does not hold. It can be applied to any quantum system consisting of two entangled particles. The most common example is a particle system entangled in spin or polarization.

Since then, physicists have done many experiments to test Bell's inequality. Among them, John Crowther and his colleagues took the lead in completing this experiment in 1972. He created entangled photon pairs by shining a laser on a special crystal, and switched between measurement settings using random numbers.

Prove Einstein wrong! The nobel prize in physics goes to quantum entanglement

△ Source: © Johan Jarnestad/Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

However, this experiment still has some limitations, such as low efficiency in generating and capturing particles, and the measurement is preset. Other researchers also questioned whether there were some loopholes in the experimental results.

But ten years later, in 1982, Alain Aspe, who was a doctoral student at that time, succeeded in making up for this limitation. His doctoral dissertation was entitled by this experiment. He detected more photons and the measurement results were also very good, and the final experimental results were in line with the prediction of quantum mechanics.

In other words, it is clear that quantum mechanics is correct, and there are no hidden variables as Einstein said.

If the first two scientists proved the theoretical nature of quantum mechanics, Anton Salinger really pushed quantum mechanics from theory to application and found that entangled quantum states have the potential to store, transmit and process information.

In 1997, Salinger and his colleagues found for the first time that if a particle in an entangled pair travels in the opposite direction and one of the particles encounters the third particle in this way, they will entangle and something interesting will happen, that is, enter a new shared state, and the third particle will lose its identity.

This way of transferring an unknown quantum state from one particle to another is called quantum teleportation.

Another is Academician Pan Jianwei's Tutor

In fact, before winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, these three leaders had won the Wolff Prize in Physics (2010) together - considered to be one of the most important awards in the field of physics besides the Nobel Prize in Physics.

As usual, take stock of the past achievements of the three big men.

Alain Aspect, a French physicist, is famous for his research on "quantum entanglement".

In addition to studying Bell inequality, Aspect also studies laser cooling of neutral atoms, mainly participating in experiments related to Bose Einstein condensation.

Prove Einstein wrong! The nobel prize in physics goes to quantum entanglement

At present, Aspect is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Technology, and a professor of the Paris Institute of Technology.

After winning the Wolf Prize for Physics in 2010, he won the Nils Bohr International Gold Award and the Neil Bohr Award of UNESCO in 2013, and was also awarded the Balzan Award for quantum information processing and communication in the same year.

It is worth mentioning that there are many firsts in Aspect's past research experience:

John Clauser is an American theoretical and experimental physicist. In 1964, he received a bachelor's degree in physics from California Institute of Technology and a doctor's degree in physics from Columbia University in 1969.

From 1969 to 1996, he mainly worked in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley.

Krause's most well-known thing is his contribution to the foundation of quantum mechanics. His CHSH prediction and Friedman Krause experiment are considered to be very important parts of quantum mechanics and have now become part of the standard physics curriculum (undergraduate).

From the outside world's perspective, his theory is equivalent to quantum mechanics as Michelson Morey's experiment is to special relativity.

Prove Einstein wrong! The nobel prize in physics goes to quantum entanglement

Anton Zeilinger is an Austrian quantum theoretical physicist. He is currently a professor of physics at the University of Vienna, and once taught at the University of Innsbruck. In addition, he is also the chairman of the Vienna Branch of the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

It is worth mentioning that Salinger is also a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a doctoral supervisor of Academician Pan Jianwei.

Professor Salinger actively promotes international academic exchanges and cooperation between China and Austria. Since 1983, he has maintained long-term communication and exchanges with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Engineering and other institutions, and has established close cooperation with many institutions.

Among them, using the "Mozi" quantum science experiment satellite, his team participated in the intercontinental quantum communication experiment led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his achievements were selected as one of the top ten developments in international physics in 2018 by the American Physical Society.

Prove Einstein wrong! The nobel prize in physics goes to quantum entanglement

In addition, Salinger is also interested in talent education. In 2009, he founded Traunkirchen, an international college dedicated to supporting talented students in science and technology.

(parenthetical remarks) Salinger is also a fan of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He even named his sailboat No. 42.

Reference link: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/

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