Walnut Creek's Nobel Prize Winner To Be Honored Locally

WALNUT CREEK, CA — The Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors will recognize recent Nobel Prize winner and Walnut Creek resident John Clauser at its meeting Tuesday.

The 79-year-old physicist was named a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics on Oct. 4 for his pioneering work on quantum information science.

Clauser will share the nearly $900,000 prize with two fellow physicists who followed in his footsteps: Alain Aspect, of Universite Paris-Saclay and Ecole Polytechnique in France, and Anton Zeilinger, of the University of Vienna in Austria.

Clauser helped prove two particles, once linked quantum mechanically, or entangled, can be separated by large distances — even the diameter of the universe — and still "know" what happens to one another.

The discovery was based on a 1971 test experiment conducted in the sub-basement of Birge Hall at UC Berkeley, where Clauser was a postdoctoral researcher back in 1971.

Alongside Stuart Freedman, a physicist and a graduate student at the time, Clauser measured "quantum entanglement" and showed that the photons could act in concert despite being physically separated.

Entangled particles are at the core of today's quantum computers. Clauser later worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors meets at 9 a.m. Tuesday in the board chambers of the county administration building, 1025 Escobar St., Martinez.

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