Morgan Mitchell

Professor Mitchell is ICREA Professor of Quantum Optics at ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences, where he leads the research group in Atomic Quantum Optics. Prof. Mitchell earned his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1999, followed by post-doctoral research stays at the ENS Paris in the group of Serge Haroche (Nobel 2012) and at the University of Toronto in the group of Aephraim Steinberg. His research encompasses quantum optics, atomic physics, quantum technology, and foundations of quantum physics. Prof. Mitchell has a long history with Bell tests, i.e. tests of Einstein’s principle of local realism, starting with the development of the first Bell test accessible to undergraduate researchers, described in “Entangled photons, nonlocality and Bell inequalities in the undergraduate laboratory” American Journal of Physics (2002). In 2015 he led the team that developed the quantum random number generators for the “loophole-free Bell tests” performed in Delft, Vienna, and Boulder, Colorado. Prof. Mitchell also leads The BIG Bell Test Collaboration, a worldwide collaboration of physicists, educators, and citizens to test local realism using human freedom of choice. In November 2016, over 100,000 participants in The BIG Bell Test played a video game designed to reward unpredictable choices, choices that were sent by internet to physics experiments on five continents. This resulted in the first Bell tests to close the so-called “freedom-of-choice loophole,” described in “Challenging Local Realism with Human Choices,” Nature (2018).