Physicist — Anton Zeilinger (Ried im Innkreis, 1945) is an Austrian physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022 together with Alain Aspect and John Clauser. Active at the University of Vienna, he is one of the leading experimentalists in the field of quantum information. His experiments have demonstrated ever more conclusively the reality of entanglement, the ‘connection at a distance’ between particles predicted by quantum mechanics, violating Bell’s inequalities and refuting the idea of local hidden variables. In 1997 his group achieved the first quantum teleportation of a particle’s state, laying the experimental foundations for quantum cryptography and future quantum computers. His work has turned theoretical paradoxes into emerging technologies.
Trivia
Zeilinger is nicknamed ‘Mister Beam’ for his quantum teleportation experiments; in 2007 he demonstrated entanglement between photons 144 km apart, between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife.
Theories and contributions
- Quantum teleportation — Transfer of the quantum state of one particle to another distant particle using entanglement and classical communication (1997).
- Tests of Bell’s inequalities — Experiments that violate Bell’s inequality, ruling out local hidden-variable theories and confirming entanglement.
Present in chapters
Linked atoms
1 linked atom.