Alain Aspect is a French physicist who is widely known for his work on quantum entanglement. He holds the Augustin Fresnel Chair at the Institut d’Optique. He is also a professor at the École Polytechnique, in Paris.
Besides, Aspect is also a member of the French Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Technologies. In 2013, the Danish Society of Engineers awarded him the Niels Bohr Medal. It was also the 100th anniversary of Niels Bohr’s atomic model, and the award was given in collaboration with the Niels Bohr Institute and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Let’s learn more about his past life, education, and his research on quantum theory.
Past life and education
Alain Aspect was born on 1947 and is a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan (ENS Cachan). Aspect passed the ‘agregation’ in physics in 1969 and went to Université d’Orsay for his master’s degree. For his national service, he taught in Cameroon for three years. He also received an honorary doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 2008.
Aspect performed the Bell test experiments that indicated that Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen’s reduction ad absurdum of quantum mechanics did actually appear to be realized when two particles were separated by a large distance. A correlation between their wave functions remained, as they were a part of the same wave function that wasn’t disturbed before one of the child particles was measured.
Aspect’s research on quantum theory
Aspect’s experiments were considered to offer further support to the thesis that Bell’s inequalities are violated in the CHSH version, in particular when a form of the locality loophole is closed. However, the results of his experiments did not completely conclude since there were loopholes that let alternate explanations comply with local realism.
After he worked on Bell’s inequalities, Aspect turned his focus to studying laser cooling of neutral atoms and is mostly involved in Bose-Einstein related experiments. He was also the deputy director of the French “grande ecole” SupOptique until 1994.
Awards Aspect won for his work
Alain Aspect has been elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2015, and his election certificate says: “For his fundamental experiments in quantum optics and atomic physics.” He was the first to exclude subluminal communication between the measurement stations in experimental demos that have been invalidated in quantum physics
Alain Aspect is also the co-inventor of the technique of velocity-selective coherent population trapping. It was the first technique to compare the Hanbury Brown-Twiss correlations of fermions and bosons under similar conditions. It was also the first to demonstrate Anderson localization in an ultra-cold atom system. Aspect’s experiments illuminate fundamental aspects of the quantum-mechanical behavior of single photons and atoms.
Alain Aspect was awarded the gold medal of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is currently the Research Director there. He won the Wolf Prize in 2010 in physics alongside Anton Zeilinger and John Clauser. In 2013, he won the Balzan Prize for Quantum Information Processing and Communication.
