Alain Aspect
Alain Aspect is a former student of ENS Cachan and Paris-Sud University (now Université Paris-Saclay). He has held positions at the Institut d’Optique, ENS Yaoundé (Cameroon), ENS Cachan, the ENS/Collège de France, and CNRS. He is currently a professor (holder of the Augustin Fresnel Chair) at the Institut d’Optique Graduate School (Université Paris-Saclay), a professor at École Polytechnique (Institut Polytechnique de Paris), and an emeritus research director at CNRS.
He is a member of several academies of sciences in France, Italy, the United States, Austria, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. Among many distinctions, he has received the CNRS Gold Medal (2005), the Wolf Prize in Physics (2010), the Balzan Prize in Quantum Information (2013), the Niels Bohr Gold Medal (2013), the Albert Einstein Medal (2013), and the Ives Medal of the Optical Society of America (2013). Alain Aspect was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Alain Aspect’s experimental work has focused on: tests of Bell’s inequalities using pairs of entangled photons (doctorat d’État, 1974–1983); wave–particle duality for single photons (1984–86, with Philippe Grangier); laser cooling of atoms down to the photon recoil limit (1985–1992, with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji); and ultra-cold atoms, quantum gases, and quantum simulators (from 1992 onward, within the atomic optics group he created at the Institut d’Optique).
Photo credit: Jean-François DARS
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