The trio won “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”.

Each winner has conducted experiments using “entangled quantum states”, which see two particles behave as one and affect each other, even though they are apart.

Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger were born in France, California and Austria respectively. Their discoveries have added to and furthered the work of John Stewart Bell, whose theorem changed the scientific world’s understanding of quantum mechanics.

The trio's work “has laid the foundation for a new era of quantum technology”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

It confirmed that “quantum mechanics actually have utility in real-world applications”, CEO of the American Institute of Physics, Michael Moloney, told CNN.

“It’s not just this theory to explain all the counterintuitive nature of the quantum world. It showed that by measuring some of the predictions we can engage in applications like quantum computing and quantum cryptography.”

Moloney said the trio’s discoveries are “potentially going to change our world in terms of really practical things, like being able to do quantum computing; solutions that will help us with everything from vaccines, to tech, to weather prediction.”

“There’s just so many different computations that we can do through quantum information science that we can’t do with classical computers,” he added.

The Nobel physics laureates for 2022. From left to right: Anton Zeilinger, John F. Clauser. and Alain Aspect.

Tuesday’s winners have been highly regarded within academics for several decades. Analytics company Clarivate said Tuesday it had forecast Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger would win a Nobel Prize in 2011, “based on a series of highly cited and independently published papers that appeared in the 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively.”

“Our selection also recognised the obvious importance of their experimental verification of ‘spooky action at a distance,’ a phenomenon of quantum mechanics that strains our imagination,” the company said.

The three scientists will share the prize money of 10 million Swedish krona ($915,000).

The prestigious Nobels are being handed out throughout the week; on Monday, Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo won the medicine award for pioneering the use of ancient DNA to unlock secrets about human evolution.

Nobel laureates in the fields of chemistry, literature and peace will be announced later this week, and the 2022 slate will conclude on Monday with the award for economics.

CNN