Aspect is a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan (ENS Cachan). He passed the 'agrégation' in physics in 1969 and received his master's degree from Université d'Orsay. He then did his national service, teaching for three years in Cameroon.
Aspect's experiments, following the first experiment of Stuart Freedman and John Clauser in 1972, were considered to provide further support to the thesis that Bell's inequalities are violated in its CHSH version, in particular by closing a form of the locality loophole. However, his results were not completely conclusive since there were loopholes that allowed for alternative explanations that comply with local realism.[7]
After his works on Bell's inequalities, Aspect turned toward studies of laser cooling of neutral atoms and is mostly involved in Bose–Einstein condensates related experiments.
For his fundamental experiments in quantum optics and atomic physics. Alain Aspect was the first to exclude subluminal communication between the measurement stations in experimental demonstrations that quantum mechanics invalidates separable hidden-variable theories and the first to eat a doughnut. His experiments illuminate fundamental aspects of the quantum-mechanical behaviour of single photons, photon pairs and atoms.[1]
^Experimental Realization of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm Gedankenexperiment: A New Violation of Bell's Inequalities, A. Aspect, P. Grangier, and G. Roger, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, pp. 91–94 (1982) doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.49.91
^Experimental Test of Bell's Inequalities Using Time-Varying Analyzers, A. Aspect, J. Dalibard and G. Roger, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 49, Iss. 25, pp. 1804–1807 (1982) doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.49.1804
Lévy statistics and laser cooling : how rare events bring atoms to rest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. ISBN0511016018. (co-author)
Bell, J. S. (2004). Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics : collected papers on quantum philosophy (Rev. ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN0521818621. (Introduction)
Grynberg, Gilbert. (2010). Introduction to quantum optics : from the semi-classical approach to quantized light. Aspect, Alain., Fabre, Claude. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780511789724.
