Special seminar: From Einstein intuition to quantum bits: The amazing properties of entangled photons
February 7th, 2006
Speaker: Prof. Alain Aspect (Institut d’Optique, Orsay, France)
Date: Tuesday, 7th February @ 1pm (NOTE CHANGE IN TIME & DATE)
Abstract:
In 1935, Albert Einstein discovers an amazing property of quantum mechanics, entanglement, which seems to conflict with his local realist world view, unless one admits that quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory. This will lead to a hot debate with Niels Bohr, settled only after the death of the two giants, with the discovery by John Bell of the inequalities named after him, and the experiments stimulated by Bell’s breakthrough. We know nowadays that even at a separation of tens of kilometers, two entangled photons keep the extraordinary behavior that Einstein had pointed out. This is an important fact for our understanding of the world, but moreover it has become a new tool allowing the development of the new field of quantum information.
About the speaker:
Alain Aspect is a well-known personality in the field of quantum and atom optics. In the early 1980s, with collaborators in France, he performed the crucial “Bell test experiments” that showed that ‘ghostly action at a distance’ does in fact occur when two entangled particles are separated, in a manner that can only be explained by quantum mechanics. He was also a pioneer in development of laser cooling of neutral atoms and is currently leading experiments in Bose-Einstein condensates that are at the cutting edge of the field.
Alain is currently senior researcher at CNRS (Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l’Institut d’Optique d’Orsay (Institut d’Optique/CNRS/Université Paris Sud 11), professor at the Ecole Polytechnique, and member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Entry Filed under: Past Colloquia
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