Alain Aspect


Alain Aspect is a French physicist noted for his experimental work on quantum entanglement.

Education

Aspect is a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan. He passed the 'agrégation' in physics in 1969 and received his master's degree from Université d'Orsay. He then did his national service, teaching for three years in Cameroon.
In the early 1980s, while working on his PhD thesis from the academic rank of lecturer, he performed the Bell test experiments that showed that Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen's reductio ad absurdum of quantum mechanics, namely that it implied 'ghostly action at a distance', did in fact appear to be realised when two particles were separated by an arbitrarily large distance. A correlation between their wave functions remained, as they were once part of the same wave-function that was not disturbed before one of the child particles was measured.
Aspect also received an honorary doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 2008.

Research

Aspect's experiments, following the first experiment of Stuart Freedman and John Clauser in 1972, were considered to provide further support to the thesis that Bell's inequalities are violated in its CHSH version, in particular by closing a form of the locality loophole. However, his results were not completely conclusive since there were loopholes that allowed for alternative explanations that comply with local realism.
After his works on Bell's inequalities, Aspect turned toward studies of laser cooling of neutral atoms and is mostly involved in Bose–Einstein condensates related experiments.
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Aspect was deputy director of the French "grande école" SupOptique until 1994. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and French Academy of Technologies, and professor at the École Polytechnique.

Awards and honors

Aspect was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2015. His certificate of election reads
In 2005 he was awarded the gold medal of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, where he is Research Director. The 2010 Wolf Prize in physics was awarded to Aspect, Anton Zeilinger and John Clauser. In 2013 Aspect was awarded both the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal and the UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal. In 2013 he was also awarded the Balzan Prize for Quantum Information Processing and Communication.
Asteroid 33163 Alainaspect, discovered by astronomers at Caussols in 1998, was named after him. The official was published by the Minor Planet Center on 8 November 2019.

Publications

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