COHEN-TANNOUDJI, CLAUDE

COHEN-TANNOUDJI, CLAUDE (1933– ), French physicist. Cohen-Tannoudji completed his Ph.D. in 1962 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was then professor at the University of Paris in 1964–73, and from 1973 professor of Atomic and Molecular Physics at the Collège de France in Paris. He is a member of the French Académie des Sciences and a foreign associate of numerous other academies of science.

He has written 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 the recipient of many awards, including the Harvey Prize in science and technology, the Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physical Society, and the Gold Medal of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He published the two-volume Quantum Mechanics (1977), written with Bernard Diu and Franck Laloë; Photons and Atoms (1989), an introduction to quantum electrodynamics, with Jacques Dupont-Roc and Gilbert Grynberg; and Atom-Photon Interactions (1992), also with Jacques Dupont-Roc and Gilbert Grynberg. He in addition published a collection of selected papers under the title Atoms in Electromagnetic Fields (1994) and Lévy Statistics and Laser Cooling – How Rare Events Bring Atoms to Rest (2001), written with Alain Aspect, François Bardou, and Jean-Philippe Bouchaud.

[Bracha Rager (2^nd ed.)]