Alain Aspect

Alain Aspect is a French physicist who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics for his experiments with quantum entanglement. He shared the prize with American physicist John F. Clauser and Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger. What happens to one particle in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other, even if they are really too far apart to affect each other. The laureates’ development of experimental tools has laid the foundation for a new era of quantum technology.

Born in 1947, Alain Aspect is an alumni of ENS Cachan and Université d'Orsay. He has held positions at Institut d'Optique, ENS Yaoundé (Cameroon), ENS Cachan, ENS/Collège de France, CNRS. He is currently Professor at Institut d'Optique Graduate School (Augustin Fresnel chair), in University Paris-Saclay, and at Ecole Polytechnique (Institut Polytechnique de Paris) and Emeritus CNRS senior scientist. He is a member of several science academies in France, Italy, USA, Austria, Belgium, UK. Among many awards, he has received the CNRS Gold medal (2005), the Wolf Prize in Physics (2010), the Balzan prize on quantum information (2013), the Niels Bohr Gold medal (2013), the Albert Einstein medal (2013), the Ives medal of the Optical society of America (2013).

Aspect's research has focused on tests of Bell's inequalities with entangled photon, wave-particle duality for single photons, laser cooling of atoms with lasers below the one photon recoil, ultra-cold atoms, quantum gases, and quantum simulators.