The jury awarded the prize to two candidates, Flaminia Giacomini and Lin-Qing Chen, who collaborated on a single work. The awarded article is entitled
“Quantum effects in gravity beyond the Newton potential from a delocalised quantum source”
The work is part of one of the most difficult and important open questions in fundamental physics: the study of the quantum characteristics of space and time. Such characteristics are expected by scientists, but at the moment there is no experimental evidence to demonstrate it. Recently, there has been much interest in some proposals to measure the quantum nature of spacetime in the laboratory via quantum effects between small masses interacting gravitationally. However, the experiments proposed so far can still be interpreted without invoking a genuinely quantum spacetime. The result of the awarded work is to have identified a regime in which gravitational effects can be measured that are genuinely quantum, in the sense that they cannot be explained by Newton’s potential or by any known classical model of gravity. The jury unanimously recognized the great scientific interest of this result, and above all the conceptual acuity on which it is based.
