Autor/es reacciones

Enrique Solano

Doctor in Physics, honorary professor at the Ikerbasque Foundation and founder of the quantum technology companies Kipu Quantum and Quanvia

I am very happy to see that the 2022 Nobel Prize recognises quantum physics. The three laureate physicists, Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, are brilliant and long-established candidates who have made important contributions and had a major impact. 

The three laureates worked on the fundamental line of quantum information in the 1970s and 1980s using photons - not matter, but electromagnetic radiation - to verify those mysterious effects of quantum physics that occur between atomic particles at a distance. 

What they verified was the principle of quantum entanglement, which says that, if you entangle or connect two atoms or two particles of light with this property, then you can put them at a distance and they still have a kind of communication that is impossible to imagine in conventional terms. There is a communication between particles due to quantum entanglement that cannot be explained in any other way than by the principles of quantum physics, which break down everyday intuition. This quantum entanglement has today been verified thousands of kilometres away. 

In its beginnings, in 1900, with Max Planck, Einstein, Schrödinger and Heisenberg, quantum physics was in the framework of the theoretical; with Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger, an era of quantum information experiments begins, the association of the principles of quantum physics with information processing arrives, and with it, quantum computation. Due to this phenomenon of quantum entanglement, it is conjectured that very soon, in five years, we will have quantum computers capable of sub-second computations that would otherwise take thousands of years with today's supercomputers. We are talking about a branch of theoretical physics that has moved into quantum technologies, a business so well established that governments in Europe, Asia and the US are investing thousands of euros in them, and there is already a global, geopolitical and technological sovereignty competition around them. I myself have created two quantum computing technology companies, one in Spain and one in Germany. 

EN