The Swedish Academy has decided to award this time the award Nobel Prize in Physics to two experimental physicists working on the area of Quantum Optics, one French, Serge Haroche and the other American (NIST Boulder Colorado) David Wineland. Once again, the academy has decided to award the award to groups from research whose results are not directly linked to industrial concerns or immediate applications. Although optics and quantum electronics have a parallel multi-billion dollar industry associated with them (lasers and optoelectronics), it is very difficult to predict that the scientific findings of the awardees will have any concrete application in the short term deadline. There is talk of quantum computing, a distant goal , which is being delineated, and also of much more precise atomic clocks, a closer goal with an important field of application, but which seems to have less industrial scope. For now, we physicists are much happier for the scientific advances that the awardees bring to the basic knowledge and for the implicit support that the award gives to experimental physics, than for the existence of possible applied problems that can be solved in a short time deadline.

Quantum Optics is a discipline that was born after the appearance of the laser in 1960. It is a fusion of classical optics with quantum mechanics and quantum electronics dedicated to tackle mainly problems of interaction of radiation (light) with subject. Within physics, optics is a very old chapter linked mainly to ophthalmology and photography, and to applications in imaging training (microscopes, telescopes). Although other sources were used at the beginning of the programs of study on radiation-subject interaction (for example, in "optical pumping", A. Kastler award Nobel 1966), Quantum Optics had to wait for its development appearance of light sources with controllable characteristics, and then wait for lasers to reach the level of quality they have today. In the 1960s, there was frequent joking between those who worked in classical optics and those who worked on the development of lasers. The opticians would say that lasers were"a solution in search of a problem" and the laserists would reply that until the advent of lasers, optics had been only"a willful attempt to harness noise." The next two decades saw a development of lasers to limits that were, at the time, unsuspected, and the development of quantum optics into a field of its own.

This year's Nobel Prizes have opened a new stage in the study of the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with subject, the possibility of interacting with and controlling a single quantum particle. In the case of Serge Haroche, in Paris quotation his experiment in which a beam of photons (particles of light at microwave frequencies) oscillates inside a small optical cavity with two highly reflective mirrors. This allows the photon a lifetime of one tenth of a second (which for a photon is equivalent to being trapped for the equivalent of one trip around the Earth). The photon is detected by passing through the cavity specially prepared atoms in highly excited states (Rydberg states). In this way, during the "long" lifetime of the trapped photon, many quantum operations can be performed without destroying it.
In the case of David Wineland, in Boulder, Colorado, the high-quality laser is used to suppress the (random) thermal motion of charged atoms (ions) trapped in an electrostatic trap. The laser allows the atom to be "cooled" to temperatures near absolute zero.

In both cases, their work builds on a long tradition of earlier experiments of this type subject.