- Person
- Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
- Lived
- b. 1933
- Field
- Atomic physics
- From
- Algerian-born French
The story
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, born in 1933 in Algeria to a Sephardic Jewish family, has said that his father taught him what he regards as the fundamental features of the Jewish tradition: studying, learning and sharing knowledge with others. Teaching has been at the centre of his career alongside the research on laser cooling that won him a share of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics.
After completing his doctorate in 1962, he followed the advice of his teacher Alfred Kastler and took a teaching position at the University of Paris. When the university created a new graduate programme, Jean Brossel asked him to teach quantum mechanics, the physics of atoms and subatomic particles, and in 1967 he was asked to teach it at a more elementary level. From that teaching experience, working with his colleagues Bernard Diu and Franck Laloë, came the textbook Mécanique quantique, first published in French in 1973.
Translated into English as Quantum Mechanics, the two-volume book became a popular and widely used text, studied by physics students around the world. It grew directly out of the classroom: the authors built it from lectures given to real students, and it reflects Cohen-Tannoudji’s view that a scientist’s job includes making new knowledge accessible to others. The Optical Society, naming him an honorary member in 2002, cited his outstanding leadership in quantum optics, from optical pumping through his seminal work on laser cooling.
Cohen-Tannoudji kept teaching throughout his career. At the Collège de France, where lectures are open to anyone and each year’s course must cover a new subject, he gave courses that led, by his own account, to research directions his group would never otherwise have explored, including laser cooling, which grew out of his lectures on the forces light exerts on atoms. With Jacques Dupont-Roc and Gilbert Grynberg he also wrote two influential books on photons and atoms, Photons and Atoms: Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics and Atom-Photon Interactions.
Why it matters
His textbook has given generations of students worldwide a clear and thorough grounding in quantum mechanics, the physics behind lasers, semiconductors, chemistry and modern technology.
About Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
Algerian-born physicist who showed how laser light can chill atoms to a millionth of a degree, the basis of today’s most precise atomic clocks, and co-wrote a classic quantum textbook. Nobel 1997.
More about Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
Sources
- Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Claude Cohen-Tannoudji Wikipedia
- Claude Cohen-Tannoudji Optica
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.