PEDLS Alain Aspect — Lecture

Event Date: May 13, 2024
Speaker: Alain Aspect, 2022 Nobel Laureate, Professor at the Institut d'Optique – Université Paris-Saclay
Time: 2:30 - 3:30 PM EST
Location: ARMS Atrium
Priority: No
College Calendar: Show
From Einstein and Bell to Quantum Technologies: Entanglement in Action


Hosted by the College of Engineering and College of Science

Alain Aspect

Abstract

As pointed out by Albert Einstein, and confirmed by the violation of Bell’s inequalities, entanglement of separated particles is an extraordinary feature of quantum mechanics, suggesting some kind of non-locality. It is now used in quantum technologies. After recalling Bell’s inequalities and their experimental tests, I will show how the notion of non-locality provides fruitful intuitions for some quantum communication methods.

Biography

Alain Aspect is an alumnus of ENSET Cachan (now ENS Paris-Saclay) and Orsay University. He is currently a professor at the Institut d'Optique-Universite Paris-Saclay and at the Ecole Polytechnique. His doctoral thesis (1983), at the Institut d'Optique, focused on experimental tests of the foundations of quantum mechanics (tests of Bell's inequalities, for which he was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger). After experiments on single photons with Philippe Grangier (1984-86), he worked on laser cooling of atoms at the Kastler Brossel laboratory of ENS Paris with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Jean Dalibard and Christophe Salomon. The group he founded at the Institut d'Optique in 1993 focuses on atomic quantum optics and atomic quantum simulators with degenerate gases.

Aspect is a member of the Academie des Sciences, the Acadmie des Technologies and several foreign academies (Austria, Belgium, Italy, UK, USA).

Co-brand for College of Engineering and College of Sciencce