French physicist Alain Aspect, laureate of the Nobel Prize 2022

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The Nobel committee has just announced that French physicist Alain Aspect was one of the laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2022. He shared his prize with American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger for their work on quantum information science. According to the French minister of higher education and research, who warmly salutes the laureate, the Nobel prize crowns both “an exceptional career and the excellence of French fundamental research”.

Since 1901, Nobel prizes are international prizes awarded in October to researchers who, “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind through their inventions, discoveries and improvements in various fields of knowledge”. In physics, France boasts no less than 15 laureates, which makes it, with literature, the two fields in which it won most prizes. In total, since its creation, 65 French laureates received the Nobel prize.

Pioneer research

As his prestigious predecessor Marie Curie, who won the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, Alain Aspect is a major French researcher, acknowledged for many years in the scientific field.

After having been awarded the Gold Medal of the CNRS (French centre for scientific research) in 2005, the Wolf Prize in 2010 and the Albert-Einstein medal in 2012, Alain Aspect was awarded the Nobel for “pioneering research in quantum technology, a key field of physics”. Aspect indeed proved “the capacity of two photons to behave as a single quantum system, even at a distance from each other, as long as they had interacted in the past” says the CNRS when detailing his career and researches. This discovery is a major breakthrough, which paved the way “for the new field of quantum technology, which today is revolutionising the processing and communication of information”.

Exceptional academic career

Alain Aspect is particularly known, says the CNRS, for shedding light on “the fundamental aspects of the quantum behaviour of single photons, photon pairs, and atoms, as well as for contributing to our understanding of the quantum world”. According to the press release of the ministry in charge of research, the work of Alain Aspect proves “the excellence of French fundamental research and its possible openness to innovation and industrialisation”.

These researches and discoveries go in par with “an exceptional career”, according to the supervising ministry. The academic career of Alain Aspect is indeed prestigious: the French laureate of the Nobel prize is today a research professor emeritus at the CNRS and at the Institut d’Optique Graduate School of the Université Paris-Saclay. He is also a professor at ENS Paris-Saclay, and École polytechnique, and works at the Charles Fabry Laboratory specialised in photonic optics and its applications.

A celebration of French research in physics

Since René Descartes (1596-1650), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), André Ampère (1775-1836) and Sadi Carnot (1796-1832), physics is, with mathematics, one of the major fields of excellence of French research. More specifically, French research in physics focuses on the study of different constituents, materials and media: elementary constituents, theoretical physics, hot plasmas; dense media, materials and components; diluted media and fundamental optics; physics and materials science.

To make research in physics in France, Campus France offers:

An info sheet to know everything about this field of excellence of French research;
The portal Research in France, a single online information access point to better understand research in France, identify doctoral schools, find a thesis offer, internships in labs, post-doctoral studies, etc.