Cohen-Tannoudji, Claude Nessim

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Claude Nessim Cohen-Tannoudji, 1933–, French physicist, b. Algeria, Ph.D. École Normale Supérieure, Paris, 1962. He has continued his research at the École Normale Supérieure, and was a professor at the Univ. of Paris from 1964 to 1973 and at the Collège de France from 1973 to 2004. Cohen-Tannoudji shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Chu and William Phillips for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. These methods, which enable individual atoms to be studied in great detail and their inner structure to be determined, have increased our knowledge of the interplay between radiation and matter.

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