The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for research on quantum entanglement of photons, the Nobel Prize Committee reports.

Specifically, the Frenchman, American and Austrian won “for experiments on entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering work in quantum information science”. Those Bell inequalities originated with John Stewart Bell, who devised the mathematical inequality. Bell argued that if there are so-called hidden variables, then the correlation between the results of a large number of measurements would never exceed a certain value. But quantum mechanics predicted that a given experiment violates that inequality.