Congratulations to our longstanding colleague, Alain Aspect, Université Paris-Saclay and École Polytechnique, France, for his award of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 and to John F. Clauser, USA and Anton Zeilinger, University of Vienna, Austria who also receive the award. According to the official press release, the new laureates have been recognised “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”. The three physicists “have each conducted groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states… Their results have cleared the way for new technology based upon quantum information.”.

Alain Aspect has published extensively with EDP Sciences in both journals and books. For those interested in Bell inequalities, see “Testing Bell’s Inequalities” which is free to read in Europhysics News. The book, “Einstein aujourd’hui” considers how Einstein continues to inspire science in the 21st century. It was written with a group of colleagues which included the renowned French physicist and fellow Nobel Prize laureate, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji.

For many years, Professor Aspect was Editor-in-Chief of the Annales de Physique which forms an important part of our physics archives collection together with the prestigious Journal de Physique. In the latter, he co-authored “Magnetically assisted Sisyphus effect” with a group of colleagues which, again, included Claude Cohen-Tannoudji.

The Annales de Physique went on to become EPJ H - Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Physics which is part of the EPJ series. EPJ D - Atomic, Molecular, Optical and Plasma Physics, in the same series, is currently publishing “Quantum Optics of Light and Matter Honouring Alain Aspect”; a special issue in celebration of the life and work of Professor Aspect. Meanwhile, EPJ Web of Conferences features an open access article by Anton Zeilinger on “Eugene Wigner – A Gedanken Pioneer of the Second Quantum Revolution”.

We were pleased to feature Professor Aspect in the EDP Sciences story video and mention another prestigious prize, the CNRS Gold Medal, which he received in 2005 for his work on quantum optics and atomic physics. He also features on our 100th anniversary poster alongside many other Nobel Prize winners associated with EDP Sciences in the course of our long history.

We are delighted by the news from Stockholm and very pleased for Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger. This is, in fact, the fifth year in a row we are celebrating the achievements of our authors in relation to the Nobel Prize in Physics.

2018: Gérard Mourou (with Donna Strickland) “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses”

2019: Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star”

2020: Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy”

2021: Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”

We are very proud of all our authors and congratulate the scientific endeavour which lies behind all high-profile awards such as the Nobel Prize.