克洛德·科恩-塔诺季1933—2026

生平

克洛德·科恩-塔诺季出生于法属阿尔及利亚的君士坦丁塞法迪犹太人家庭。从当地大学毕业后，他来到巴黎，进到了巴黎高等师范学院。

他的指导教授包括亨利·嘉当、洛朗·施瓦茨和阿尔弗雷德·卡斯特勒。

1958年他与一名高校教师雅克利娜·韦拉（Jacqueline Veyrat）结婚。

他的求学一度由于被征召而中断，在军队中度过了28个月（因阿尔及利亚战争的缘故，时间较一般役期更长）。

1960年，他回到学校并在1962年取得博士学位。

他开始在巴黎大学教授量子力学。以该课程的授课讲义为基础，他与两位同事写了一本知名教科书《Mécanique quantique》。

此外他也继续有关原子-光子相互作用的研究，他的研究团队发展了光缀饰态的模型。

1973年他成为了法兰西公学院的教授。在1980年代早期，他开始了教授有关激光场对原子的作用。

同时他也与阿兰·阿斯佩等人一同成立了一个实验室，关注于激光冷却与束缚。

最终他的研究工作让他与朱棣文和威廉·丹尼尔·菲利普斯一同获得1997年的诺贝尔物理奖

获奖

1979年 因光学里关于场的杰出研究获得英国物理学会杨氏奖；

1997年 由于“发展了用激光冷却和捕获原子的方法”，获得诺贝尔物理奖。

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (French pronunciation: [klod kɔɛn tanudʒi]; 1 April 1933 – 22 October 2026) was a French physicist at the École normale supérieure in Paris. He was known for his experiments in laser cooling. He was the first to show that it is possible to cool far beyond the limit expected by sub-Doppler cooling, below the recoil temperature.

Cohen-Tannoudji shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Chu and William Daniel Phillips for research in methods of laser cooling and trapping atoms.

Early life

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji was born in Constantine, French Algeria, on 1 April 1933, to Algerian Sephardic Jewish parents Abraham Cohen-Tannoudji and Sarah Sebbah. When describing his origins Cohen-Tannoudji said: "My family, originally from Tangier, settled in Tunisia and then in Algeria in the 16th century after having fled Spain during the Inquisition. In fact, our name, Cohen-Tannoudji, means simply the Cohen family from Tangiers. The Algerian Jews obtained the French citizenship in 1870 after Algeria became a French colony in 1830."

After finishing secondary school in Algiers in 1953, Cohen-Tannoudji left for Paris to attend the École Normale Supérieure. His professors included Henri Cartan, Laurent Schwartz, and Alfred Kastler. Gilles Cohen-Tannoudji, Claude's brother, also became a physicist.

In 1958 Cohen-Tannoudji married Jacqueline Veyrat, a high school teacher, with whom he has three children. His studies were interrupted when he was conscripted into the army, in which he served for 28 months (longer than usual because of the Algerian War). During this time he is hired by Jacques Blamont to work on the Véronique rocket in the Algerian station in Béchar.

In 1960 he resumed working toward his doctorate, which he obtained from the École Normale Supérieure under the supervision of Alfred Kastler and Jean Brossel at the end of 1962. Cohen-Tannoudji was also one of the earliest students of the summer programs of Les Houches School of Physics.

Career

After his dissertation, he started teaching quantum mechanics at the University of Paris. From 1964-67, he was an associate professor at the university and from 1967-1973 he was a full professor. His lecture notes were the basis of the popular textbook, Quantum Mechanics (French: Mécanique quantique), which he wrote with his colleagues Bernard Diu and Franck Laloë. He also continued his research work on atom-photon interactions, and his research team developed the model of the dressed atom.

In 1973, he became a professor at the Collège de France. In the early 1980s, he started to lecture on radiative forces on atoms in laser light fields. He also formed a laboratory there with Alain Aspect, Christophe Salomon, and Jean Dalibard to study laser cooling and trapping. He took a statistical approach to laser cooling with the use of stable distributions.

In 1976, he took sabbatical leave from the Collège de France, and lectured at Harvard University and MIT. At Harvard, he was a Loeb Lecturer for two weeks, and at MIT, he was a visiting professor.

In 1995, working with Aspect and others, he managed to cool helium down to180 nK in 1995.

Steven Chu and William Daniel Phillips pioneered laser cooling experiments in the 1980s, demonstrating that photon collisions could cool atomic gases below 1 mK through Doppler cooling. Subsequent observations revealed cooling beyond the Doppler limit, which Cohen-Tannoudji explained theoretically and used to develop more effective cooling methods. In 1995, his team cooled helium gas to even lower temperatures, reaching 180 nK. His work eventually led to the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997 "for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light", shared with Chu and Phillips. Cohen-Tannoudji was the first physics Nobel prize winner born in an Arab country.

Serge Haroche, 2012 Nobel Prize laureate in Physics, was a doctoral student of Cohen-Tannoudji.

Death

Cohen-Tannoudji died in Paris on 22 October 2026, at the age of 93.

Awards

1969 – CNRS Silver Medal

1979 – Young Medal and Prize, for distinguished research in the field of optics.

1991 – Research Award of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

1993 – Charles Hard Townes Award

1994 – honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Uppsala University, Sweden

1996 – Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physical Society

1996 – CNRS Gold medal

1997 – Nobel Prize, "for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light"

2002 – Honorary Member of the Optical Society

2010 – Legion of Honour