The French physicist and Nobel laureate Claude Cohen-Tannoudji died in Paris on 22 October at the age of 93. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Chu and William Phillips “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”.
Chu and Phillips bagged their shares of the prize for their pioneering experimental work in the 1980s that showed that photon collisions can be used cool atomic gases to temperatures well below 1 mK. Initially, this was understood in terms of a process called Doppler cooling. However, it soon became apparent that it was possible to cool atoms to temperatures well below that expected from Doppler cooling.
That mystery was solved by theoretical work done by Cohen-Tannoudji, who used this insight to devise a way to cool atoms to much colder temperatures. Working with future Nobel laureate Alain Aspect and others he managed to cool a helium gas to ever colder temperatures – reaching 180 nK in 1995.
Cohen-Tannoudji was born on 1 April 1933 in Constantine, Algeria. He left Algeria for France in 1953, the year before the Algerian War of Independence began. In Paris he enrolled in the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS). He graduated in 1957, did extended military service because of the war in Algeria, and returned to the ENS in 1960 to do a PhD. He was supervised by Alfred Kastler (a future Nobel laureate) and Jean Brossel and his dissertation focused on theoretical and experimental aspects of optical pumping.
Cohen-Tannoudji then taught physics at the University of Paris and began supervising PhD students – including Serge Haroche, who shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the measurement and manipulation of quantum systems.
As well as his ground-breaking research, Cohen-Tannoudji is known for writing the three-volume textbook Mécanique quantique with Bernard Diu and Franck Laloë. Available in English translation as Quantum Mechanics, the book has garnered praise for its unique approach to teaching quantum physics.
