Washington, DC--The Optical Society (OSA) and the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG) will award Alain Aspect of the Laboratoire Charles Fabry, Institut d’Optique (Palaiseau, France) with the joint 2012 Herbert Walther Award. Selected for his contributions to the fields of quantum entanglement and cold atom physics, he will receive the award during the spring DPG meeting in Stuttgart, Germany, to be held March 12–16, 2012.
Aspect is a CNRS distinguished scientist and head of the Atom Optics Group at the Laboratoire Charles Fabry, Institut d’Optique. Among his noteworthy accomplishments is his work with Bell test experiments. In conducting these tests, Aspect demonstrated the ability of a quantum event at one location to randomly influence an event at a separate location. His fundamental experiments on wave-particle duality of light have contributed to the emergence of the field of quantum information. He has also worked with laser cooling of neutral atoms and experiments related to Bose-Einstein condensates. Aspect is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, as well as the French Academy of Technologies, and is a fellow of OSA, the European Optical Society, and the American Physical Society. He has received several major awards, among them the OSA Max Born Award (1999), the CNRS Gold Medal of 2005, the European Physical Society Quantum Electronics and Optics Senior Prize (2009), and the 2010 Wolf Prize in Physics.
Established in 2007, the Herbert Walther Award honors Professor Herbert Walther for the seminal influence of his ground-breaking innovations in quantum optics and atomic physics, and for his wide-ranging contributions to the international scientific community. The award is jointly made by DPG and OSA and presented by each society in alternate years, recognizing distinguished contributions in quantum optics and atomic physics as well as leadership in the international scientific community.
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