The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2022 to John F. Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger. Their ground-breaking work in the field of quantum mechanics garnered significant attention. The 2021 prize was given to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for their research on climate models and Giorgio Parisi for his exploration of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems. Meanwhile, the Nobel Prize for 2022 in Physiology or Medicine went to Svante Pääbo for his analysis in the field of extinct hominins’ genomes and human evolution.
Understanding Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Entanglement
Mechanics, a branch of physics, studies the movement and interaction of bodies. It comprises two segments – classical and quantum. Classical mechanics scrutinizes the motion of macroscopic objects and the forces impacting them.
Contrastingly, quantum mechanics delves into the behavior of particles—atoms, electrons, photons, and almost everything in the molecular and sub-molecular domain. Quantum mechanics introduces a new concept — entanglement, under which subatomic particles exist in a shared state where they possess complementary properties. The measurement of one particle’s properties reveals the properties of the other, regardless of the distance between the two.
The Concept of Bell Inequality
In the 1960s, John Stewart Bell propounded the mathematical inequality called Bell Inequality. It posits that if hidden variables are present, the correlation between a large number of measurements’ results will never surpass a particular value. Incidentally, quantum mechanics predicts experimental violation of Bell’s inequality, leading to stronger than expected correlations.
The Award-Winning Experiment
The laureates scooped the prize for their experiments involving entangled photons (quantum entanglement), establishing the violation of Bell inequalities, which further led to quantum information science’s groundbreaking advancements.
John F. Clauser built upon John Bell’s ideas and successfully performed an experiment validating quantum mechanics by violating a Bell inequality. Alain Aspect improved the setup, closing a significant loophole, whereas Anton Zeilinger was acknowledged for his resourceful use of entanglement and Bell pairs both in research and applications such as quantum cryptography.
The Significance of the Experiment
The inception of these experimental tools triggered a new technological era rooted in quantum information. The experiment’s findings will enable enhanced utilization of individual particle systems’ unique properties to develop quantum computers, improve measurements, construct quantum networks, establish secure quantum encrypted communication (quantum cryptography), and enable precise timekeeping in atomic clocks.
UPSC Civil Services Examination Previous Year Questions
In the 2008 prelims, one question asked about a scientist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with his son. The answer was William Henry Bragg. Another question probed for the area of work of Nobel Prize-winning scientist James D. Watson, the correct response being genetics. In the mains exam, questions revolved around how the 2014 Nobel Prize-winning invention of Blue LEDs impacted daily human life and the revolution in the field of Physics brought about by ‘Bose-Einstein Statistics’ by Prof. Satyendra Nath Bose.
