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| Serge Haroche (l) is based at the College de France and David Wineland is based at the US National Institute for Standards and Technology |
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This year's
Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to two researchers for their work with
light and matter at the most fundamental level.
Serge
Haroche of France and David Wineland of the US will share the prize, worth 8m
Swedish kronor (£750,000; $1.2m).
Their
"quantum optics" work deals with single photons and ions, the basic
units of light and matter.
It could
lead to advanced modes of communication and computation.
The Nobel citation said the award was for "ground-breaking experimental methods that
enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems".
Light and
matter, when the minuscule scales of single particles are reached, behave in
surprising ways in a part of physics known as quantum mechanics.
Working
with light and matter on this level would have been unthinkable before the pair
developed solutions to pick, manipulate and measure photons and ions
individually, allowing an insight into a microscopic world that was once just
the province of scientific theory.
Their work
has implications for light-based clocks far more precise than the atomic clocks
at the heart of the world's business systems, and quantum computing, which may
- or may not - revolutionise desktop computing as we know it.
But for
physicists, the import of the pair's techniques is outlined in a layman's summary on the Nobel site: they preserve the delicate quantum mechanical states
of the photons and ions - states that theorists had for decades hoped to
measure in the laboratory, putting the ideas of quantum mechanics on a solid
experimental footing.
Those
include the slippery quantum mechanical ideas of "entanglement" - the
seemingly ethereal connection between two distant particles that underpins much
work on the "uncrackable codes" of quantum cryptography - and of
"decoherence", in which the quantum nature of a particle slowly slips
away through its interactions with other matter.
The prize
is the second in quantum optics in recent years; the theory behind decoherence
formed part of 2005's Nobel physics prize citation.
'Overwhelming'
Prof
Haroche was reached by phone from the press conference. He had been told he had
won just 20 minutes before telling reporters: "I was lucky - I was in the
street and passing near a bench, so I was able to sit down immediately.
 |
| Dr Wineland's work uses an "ion trap" in which charged particles are tested using light |
"I was
walking with my wife going back home and when I saw the... Swedish code, I
realised it was real and it's, you know, really overwhelming."
Prof Sir
Peter Knight of the UK's Institute of Physics, said: "Haroche and Wineland
have made tremendous advances in our understanding of quantum entanglement,
with beautiful experiments to show how atomic systems can be manipulated to
exhibit the most extraordinary coherence properties."
The Nobel
prizes have been given out annually since 1901, covering the fields of
medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.
Speculation
had been rife, in light of the discovery of the Higgs boson announced in July,
that Peter Higgs or his colleagues may have been in the running for the prize,
but historically the prizes tend to honour discoveries after a period of years.
The
first-ever Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Wilhelm Roentgen of Germany
for his discovery of X-rays, and with this year's winners the total number of
recipients has reached 194.
On Monday,
the 2012 prize for medicine or physiology was awarded to John Gurdon from the
UK and Shinya Yamanaka from Japan for changing adult cells into stem cells,
which can become any other type of cell in the body.
This year's
chemistry prize will be announced on Wednesday, with the
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