Atom optics at the Institut d'Optique

Researchers at the Institut d'Optique Graduate School at the CNRS and Université Paris-Saclay in France have developed a new way to rearrange cold atoms one-by-one in fully ordered arrays.

Weiping Zhang

Alain Aspect

The emergence of Quantum Optics, in the second half of the 20th century, was closely related to landmark experiments, which were permitted by the development of single photon detection and correlation measurements. Photon correlation techniques allowed experimentalists to demonstrate effects closely linked to two-photon amplitudes interference with entangled states, a phenomenon emblematic of the second quantum revolution. In the Atom Optics group at Institut d'Optique, we revisit these experiments with photons replaced by metastable Helium atoms, which can be detected individually. After the Hanbury Brown Twiss and the Hong Ou Mandel experiments, we aim at realizing a test of Bell's inequalities with atoms entangled in momentum, i.e., in external degrees of freedom sensitive to mass.

Jeffry V. Mallow A, Helge Kastrup

Chapter 21 . Alain Aspect In quantum mechanics, two principles have been proposed that seemed to be in conflict. 1) The principle of locality (particles can only influence each other when being in communication distance) and 2) The principle of objective reality (particles should have definite properties even when we are not measuring them). Aspect is a French professor of physics employed at the Institut d’Optique in Paris-Saclay. His work covers quantum optics, cold atoms in Bose-Einstein condensates, and the quantum mechanical locality problem. In a ground-breaking series of experiments, he proved with great certainty that Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, who argued for principle 2) above, were wrong. For this work, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2022, with John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger.

S. L. Rolston, William D. Phillips