The Paul Ehrenfest Best Paper Award for Quantum Foundations for the year 2015
The Paul Ehrenfest Best Paper Award for Quantum Foundations for the year 2015 was awarded jointly to three publications by groups at the TU Delft (The Netherlands), the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST (USA) for simultaneously closing the locality and detection loopholes in Bell experiments, thereby corroborating quantum mechanics and ruling out theories that satisfy local causality.
The 2015 winners
The three winning papers are:
B. Hensen, H. Bernien, A. E. Dréau, A. Reiserer, N. Kalb, M. S. Blok, J. Ruitenberg, R. F. L. Vermeulen, R. N. Schouten, C. Abellán, W. Amaya, V. Pruneri, M. W. Mitchell, M. Markham, D. J. Twitchen, D. Elkouss, S. Wehner, T. H. Taminiau and R. Hanson, Loophole-free Bell inequality violation using electron spins separated by 1.3 kilometres, Nature 526, 682–686 (2015).
M. Giustina, M. A. M. Versteegh, S. Wengerowsky, J. Handsteiner, A. Hochrainer, K. Phelan, F. Steinlechner, J. Kofler, J.-Å. Larsson, C. Abellán, W. Amaya, V. Pruneri, M. W. Mitchell, J. Beyer, T. Gerrits, A. E. Lita, L. K. Shalm, S. W. Nam, T. Scheidl, R. Ursin, B. Wittmann and A. Zeilinger, Significant-Loophole-Free Test of Bell’s Theorem with Entangled Photons, Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 250401 (2015).
L. K. Shalm, E. Meyer-Scott, B. G. Christensen, P. Bierhorst, M. A. Wayne, M. J. Stevens, T. Gerrits, S. Glancy, D. R. Hamel, M. S. Allman, K. J. Coakley, S. D. Dyer, C. Hodge, A. E. Lita, V. B. Verma, C. Lambrocco, E. Tortorici, A. L. Migdall, Y. Zhang, D. R. Kumor, W. H. Farr, F. Marsili, M. D. Shaw, J. A. Stern, C. Abellán, W. Amaya, V. Pruneri, T. Jennewein, M. W. Mitchell, P. G. Kwiat, J. C. Bienfang, R. P. Mirin, E. Knill and S. W. Nam, Strong Loophole-Free Test of Local Realism, Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 250402 (2015).
The award is intended for a single outstanding publication during the respective award year. However, regulations stipulate that “in exceptional cases, more than one publication may be chosen by the selection committee to receive the award.” And for this first award year, the committee has come to the decision that just such an exceptional case applies.
The selection procedure
The members of the selection committee of the Paul Ehrenfest Best Paper Award for Quantum Foundations 2015 were:
Nicolas Gisin, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Rob Spekkens, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada
Aephraim Steinberg, University of Toronto, Canada
Caslav Brukner, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
Alain Aspect, Institut d'Optique, France
The selection of the award-winning publications was achieved by a vote of those committee members who had no conflict of interest.
The award ceremony
The public award ceremony took place at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Vienna, in Christian Doppler lecture hall, on December 2nd, 2016. A representative author from each publication presented a public award lecture at this occasion.
Watch the award ceremony on Youtube HERE
The award winners:
