The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2012 to Serge Haroche, College de France and Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France, and  David J Wineland, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado Boulder, CO, USA "for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems".

"Perhaps the quantum computer will change our everyday lives in this century in the same radical way as the classical computer did in the last century," it said.

Serge Haroche and David J Wineland have independently invented and developed methods for measuring and manipulating individual particles while preserving their quantum-mechanical nature, in ways that were previously thought unattainable.