Open RQC colloquium. Lecture 42

ATTENTION! The colloquium will be on Thursday, May 24, at the Conference Hall Б-607 on the 6th floor, the entrance to the building will be from the professors' entrance!

Abstract

In 1935, with co-authors Podolsky and Rosen, Einstein discovered a weird quantum situation, in which particles in a pair are so strongly correlated that Schrödinger called them “entangled”. By analyzing that situation, Einstein concluded that the quantum formalism is incomplete. Niels Bohr immediately opposed that conclusion, and the debate lasted until the death of these two giants of physics. 

In 1964, John Bell discovered that it is possible to settle the debate experimentally, by testing the now celebrated "Bell's inequalities", and to show directly that the revolutionary concept of entanglement is indeed a reality. A long series of experiments, started in 1972, have produced more and more precise results, in situations closer and closer to the ideal theoretical scheme. After explaining the debate, and describing some experiments, Alain Aspect will show how this conceptual discussion has prompted the emergence of the new field of quantum information, at the heart of the second quantum revolution.

Biography

Alain Aspect is a french physicist and professor in such institutes as Ecole Polytechnique (École Polytechnique) and Institute of optics (Institut d'optique Graduate School). He is a member of the five Academy of Sciences including French and Austrian. Professor Aspect designed some experiments where he is touching the key issues of quantum physics. In his work various phenomena which radically distinguish laws of physics from the usual laws of classic world were researched. For the first time Alain’s experiments of quantum entanglement demonstrated that Quantum mechanics predictions have probabilistic nature on the fundamental level and can not be explained by any unknown (hide) parameters. That question was a subject of discussion between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Therefore experiments have shown that phenomenon of quantum entanglement and the related quantum mechanical phenomena can not be explained from the point of classical concepts. There are exotic quantum states of matter, which arise at temperatures close to absolute zero in professor Aspect work. In Aspect’s experiments Anderson localization was shown appearing in a wide class of physical systems in the presence of a random potential. Alain Aspect has variety of awards in Physics including the Gold Medal of CNRS (2005), the Gold Medal of Niels Bohr (2013), the Albert Einstein Medal (2013), the Ives Medal Optical Society of America (2013) and others.

Please don't forget to take passport for entering to the University. We will meet you at the guard desk.

FREE ENTRANCE.