Claude Cohen-Tannoudji

French physicist Claude Cohen-Tannoudji shared the Nobel Prize in 1997 with Steven Chu and William Phillips for developing techniques to cool atoms to temperatures near absolute zero by using lasers to slow the atoms to a near standstill.

Cohen-Tannoudji was born to Algerian Jewish parents on April 1, 1933 in Constantine, Algeria which was then part of France. For both his undergraduate and graduate education, he attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. After several decades of work in quantum mechanics and atom- photon interactions, he began studying the ways atoms reacted to the radiative forces in laser light fields in the 1980s when he was a professor at the College de France in Paris. It was there that he did much of his work on laser cooling and trapping. Today he is once again working at his alma-mater the École Normale Supérieure.

Additional resources:

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji’s autobiography on the Nobel Prize site http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1997/cohen-tannoudji-autobio.html