Context: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. 

• The top science award was given to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for their work in quantum physics.

• According to the official website of the awards, the three won “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”.

QUANTUM PHYSICS

• This field of Physics aims to explore the building blocks of nature around us at the minutest level.

• According to Caltech, quantum experiments deal with very small objects, such as electrons and photons, and could close gaps in our knowledge of physics to give us a more complete picture of our everyday lives. 

• Work around quantum physics began as early as the 1800s with observations around atoms as physicists sat down to understand how they work at a fundamental level.

• This field of science could find answers to why things work the way they do, be it physics, chemistry, or biology. 

• The world is now moving towards quantum communication, which is being held as the safest way of communicating that works on principles of hard encryption.

Note: The India Space Research Organisation (ISRO), in February this year, demonstrated satellite-based quantum entanglement using real-time Quantum Key Distribution. 

• Quantum communication is one of the safest ways of connecting two places with high levels of code and quantum cryptography that cannot be decrypted or broken by an external entity. 

• If a hacker tries to crack the message in quantum communication, it changes its form in such a manner that would alert the sender and would cause the message to be altered or deleted.

Key Highlights

• The three newly awarded laureates experimented with quantum physics

• They conducted groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states

• This year's winners of the Nobel in Physics led the work around quantum physics.

• While John Clauser developed John Bell’s ideas and took measurements that supported quantum mechanics by clearly violating a Bell inequality, Alain Aspect of the Université Paris-Saclay and École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France developed the setup, using it in a way that closed an important loophole in Clauser's experiments.

• Meanwhile, Anton Zeilinger, using refined tools and a long series of experiments, started to use entangled quantum states. The research group demonstrated a phenomenon called quantum teleportation, which makes it possible to move a quantum state from one particle to one at a distance.

Key Significance

• The fundamentals of quantum mechanics are not just a theoretical or philosophical issue. Intense research and development are underway to utilise the special properties of individual particle systems to construct quantum computers, improve measurements, build quantum networks and establish secure quantum encrypted communication.

• This year’s laureates have explored these entangled quantum states, and their experiments laid the foundation of the revolution currently underway in quantum technology.