Today the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences has announced the Nobel Prize for Physics will go to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger. Their victory is unexpected but utterly deserved: All three laureates have made a substantial contribution to significant scientific progress in several ways.
First of all, the experiments led by them helped solve a decade-long dispute over the interpretation of quantum physics – the basic theory of the micro-world. “Experiments with quantum-correlated (entangled) photons, which started in the 70s of the 20th century, and were enabled by the progress in the development of individual photon detectors, proved the so called Bell‘s inequalities, thus dispelling any doubts about the completeness of the quantum theory," says the Head of the Joint Laboratory of Optics of Palacky University and the FZU of the Czech Academy of Sciences prof. Ondřej Haderka.
Simultaneously, these experiments also opened the way to practical use of quantum correlations which are a powerful instrument when developing new quantum technologies, allowing us to overcome a number of limitations imposed by classical physics. As a result, the application domain is not only complemented by quantum cryptography methods at the moment but other methods will hopefully follow in the future, including other quantum communication and quantum information processing methods such as quantum computing, quantum imaging or quantum metrology.
Professor Anton Zeilinger – one of the winners – has had close ties with the Institute of Physics in Prague; he has visited the Institute for several times in the past. For example in 2010, he gave an official lecture to commemorate the former FZU Director Vladimír Dvořák. In 2017, he attended our conference Frontiers of Quantum and Mesoscopic Thermodynamics (FQMT) and gave a public talk called From quantum puzzles to quantum information technology. At this occasion, Anton Zeilinger’s work was praised by the President of the Czech Senate Milan Štěch, who awarded him a silver commemorative medal.
Prof. Anton Zeilinger (uprostřed) proslovil na FZU v roce 2010 slavnostní přednášku k památce bývalého ředitele FZU Vladimíra Dvořáka
The area of Individual photon detection and quantum information processing is also studied by the Group of quantum and non linear optics at the Joint Laboratory of Optics of the Palacky University and the FZU of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The group primarily deals with photon detection techniques with the differentiation of their number; detection and quantification of non-classicality of their states, and the development of elements for quantum communication systems.