STOCKHOLM — An American and a French scientist won the Nobel Prize in physics yesterday for finding ways to measure quantum particles without destroying them.
The work of David Wineland and Serge Haroche could make it possible to build a new kind of computer far more powerful than any seen before.
Wineland, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, and Haroche, of the College de France and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, both 68, found ways to manipulate the very smallest particles of matter and light to observe strange behavior that previously could only be imagined.
Wineland has described his work as a “parlor trick” that performed the seemingly magical feat of putting an object in two places at once.