Prof. Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
Prof. Claude Cohen-Tannoudji is a French physicist and Nobel Laureate. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Chu and William Daniel Phillips for “development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”. He is an active researcher, working at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Cohen-Tannoudji was born in Constantine, Algeria under the French rule. After finishing secondary school in Algiers in 1953, Cohen-Tannoudji left for Paris to attend the École normale supérieure. He completed his Ph.D. with Professors Alfred Kastler and Jean Brossel in 1962 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He then occupied a position of Professor at the University of Paris from 1964 to 1973. From 1973 to 2004, he was Professor of Atomic and Molecular Physics at the Collège de France in Paris. He has been a member of the French Académie des Sciences since 1981, and a foreign member associate of many Academies of Sciences over the world.
He has been invited to give series of lectures in several Universities in Europe, United States, Canada, Israel, India, China, Indonesia, Korea, Brasil,….
He wrote about 200 theoretical and experimental papers dealing with various problems of atomic physics and quantum optics : optical pumping and light shifts, dressed atom approach for understanding the behavior of atoms in intense RF or optical fields, quantum interference effects, resonance fluorescence, photon correlations, physical interpretation of radiative corrections, radiative forces, laser cooling and trapping, Bose-Einstein condensation. He is co-author of books on quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, quantum optics, Levy statistics.