Niels Bohr Lecture: Nobel Colloquium 2012
Following the Nobel Prize ceremony, this year’s winners will present their prize winning work in a Niels Bohr Lecture on December 14 at 17:30, in Aud. 1 at HCØ.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2012 was awarded jointly to Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland "for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems".
Serge Haroche
Born: 1944, Casablanca, Morocco
Affiliation at the time of the award: Collège de France, Paris, France, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
Title of lecture: Controlling photons in a box and exploring the quantum to classical boundary
David J. Wineland
Born: 1944, Milwaukee, WI, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, CO, USA, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA.
Title of lecture: Superposition, entanglement, and raising Schrödinger’s cat
Particle control in a quantum world
Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland have independently invented and developed ground-breaking methods for measuring and manipulating individual particles while preserving their quantum-mechanical nature, in ways that were previously thought unattainable.
Haroche and Wineland have opened the door to a new era of experimentation with quantum physics by demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum systems without destroying them.
Through their ingenious laboratory methods they have managed to measure and control very fragile quantum states, enabling their field of research to take the very first steps towards building a new type of super fast computer, based on quantum physics. These methods have also led to the construction of extremely precise clocks that could become the future basis for a new standard of time, with more than hundredfold greater precision than present-day caesium clocks.