2012 Nobel Prize for Physics laureates: Morocco-born Serge Haroche, France (L), and David Wineland, U.S.
**Serge Haroche, born in Casablanca, Morocco has won the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with American David Wineland from Boulder, Colorado**
Haaretz, Associated Press (October 10, 2012) — Serge Haroche, a French-Jewish physicist who was born in Casablanca, Morocco, has won the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with David Wineland from the United States.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2012 went to the scientists “for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems,” the website of the Nobel Prize said.
According to the BBC, the pair developed solutions to pick, manipulate and measure photons and ions individually, allowing an insight into a microscopic world that was once just the province of scientific theory.
Haroche, who was born 68 years ago in Casablanca, Morocco, told Le Figaro that he “had a hard time understanding” the news when a representative of the Nobel Prize committee called him on his cellular phone to say he had won what is considered the highest form of recognition of scientific excellence.
Haroche, of Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure, will share a $1.2 million grant from the Nobel Prize Committee with Wineland, a researcher at the Maryland-based National Institute of Standards and Technology and at the University of Colorado.
Le Figaro quotes Haroche as saying he was walking with his wife down the street when he received the call from Sweden. He said he had to sit down on a bench before passing on the news to family.
Richard Prasquier, the president of CRIF, the umbrella organization of France’s Jewish communities, told JTA: “The achievement belongs to the scientists, but a small part of me is also proud today.” Mutual friends described Haroche to Prasquier as “a truly brilliant thinker, known for his creativity,” Prasquier said.
Prasquier noted that Haroche had worked closely with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji – also a French Jew of North African descent – who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997.
Haroche and Wineland, both 68, were honoured for pioneering optical experiments in “measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems,” the Nobel Physics jury said in its citation.
“Their groundbreaking methods have enabled this field of research to take the very first steps towards building a new type of super-fast computer based on quantum physics,” it said. “Perhaps the quantum computer will change our everyday lives in this century in the same radical way as the classical computer did in the last century.”
Wineland cautioned on Tuesday such a super-computer was “a long, long way” off. “I think many of us feel that it will eventually happen,” he said in a pre-dawn phone interview recorded and posted on the Nobel committee website.
The research has also led to the construction of extremely precise clocks that could become the future basis for a new standard of time, with more than hundred-fold greater precision than present-day caesium clocks, it said.
Haroche said the award was “fairly overwhelming. I was in the street, passing near a bench, and was able to sit down immediately,” he told journalists via a live link to Stockholm. “I was walking with my wife, when I saw the Swedish area code, I realised. I think we will have champagne,” he added.
Wineland said he was wakened in the middle of the night at his home in Boulder, Colorado with a phone call from the committee in Stockholm. “I was sleeping and my wife got the call and woke me up,” he said, adding that it was “a wonderful surprise, of course.”
French President Francois Hollande praised Haroche for his win, calling it a “source of pride for our country.”
Specialists in optics, the two scientists worked independently of each other to trap particles, enabling the quantum state to be examined and manipulated at ultra-low temperatures. Jim al-Khalili, a professor of physics at Britain’s University of Surrey, said the research had taken quantum out of the realm of “science fiction or, at best, the wilder imaginations of quantum physicists.”
Both Wineland and Haroche specialise in quantum entanglement, a phenomenon of particle physics that has been proven by experiments but remains poorly understood. When two particles interact, they become “entangled,” which means one particle affects the other at a distance. The connection lasts long after they are separated. In entanglement, particles also go into a state called superposition, which opens the way to hoped-for supercomputers.
Today’s computers use a binary code, in which data is stored in a bit that could be either zero or 1. But in superposition, a quantum bit, known as a qubit, could be either zero or one, or both zero and one at the same time.
This potentially offers a massive increase in data storage, greatly helping number-crunching tasks such as running climate-change models and breaking encrypted codes. But many technical hurdles remain to be overcome.
Haroche and Wineland’s achievement has been to measure and control these very fragile quantum states, which were previously deemed inaccessible, so that the particles can be observed and counted, the jury said.
The Institute of Physics society in London hailed the award. “Haroche and Wineland have made tremendous advances in our understanding of quantum entanglement, with beautiful experiments to show how atomic systems can be manipulated to exhibit the most extraordinary coherence properties,” said Peter Knight, the institute’s president.
Haroche is a professor at College de France and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, while Wineland is a group leader at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado.
