Alain Aspect is CNRS research director and professor at the Institut d'Optique Graduate School, (“SupOptique”), and at the École Polytechnique.
He leads the Quantum Gas group at the Charles Fabry Laboratory (Institut d'Optique/CNRS).
Among his many contributions to the fields of quantum optics and atomic optics, the fundamental experiments carried out by his team in 1982 at the Charles Fabry Laboratory were particularly notable.
These experiments confirmed the revolutionary nature of quantum entanglement, which Einstein had intuited, and whose experimental demonstration was made possible by the theoretical work of John Bell. These results paved the way for research into quantum information and the development of technologies such as quantum cryptography and quantum computing.
Alain Aspect is interested in situations in which the predictions of quantum mechanics are very far from intuition. Among other pioneering works, we will cite the first source of single photons with Philippe Grangier in 1985, then between 1985 and 1992, the cooling of atoms by laser with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, as well as the current research of his Quantum Gases group on Bose-Einstein condensates and atom lasers.
This fundamental work is now leading to unexpected applications: quantum cryptography, quantum computers, but also, more prosaically, telecommunications.
