SERGE HAROCHE

Professor emeritus of Collège de France
Member of the French Academy of Sciences
Member of the European Academy of Sciences
Member (Foreign associate) of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
Member (Foreign associate) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Member (Foreign associate) of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences
Laureate of 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics

Serge Haroche is a world-renowned Scientist. He was born in 1944 in Casablanca. He graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in 1967, receiving his doctorate from Paris VI University in 1971. After a post-doctoral visit to Stanford University in the laboratory of Arthur Schawlow (1972-1973), he became full professor at Paris VI University in 1975, a position he held until 2001, when he was appointed Professor at Collège de France (in the chair of quantum physics). He has been Maitre de Conference at Ecole Polytechique (1974-1984), visiting professor at Harvard (1981), part time professor at Yale University (1984-1993), member of Institut Universitaire de France (1991-2000) and chairman of the ENS Department of Physics (1994-2000).

Serge Haroche has received many prizes and awards, including the Grand Prix Jean Ricard of the French Physical Society (1983), the Einstein Prize for Laser science (1988), the Humbold Award (1992), the Michelson Medal from the Franklin Institute (1993), the Tomassoni Award from La Sapienza University (Rome, 2001), the Quantum Electronics prize of the European Physical Society (2002), the Quantum Communication Award of the International Organization for Quantum Communication, Measurement and Computing (2002), the Townes Award of the Optical Society of America (2007), the CNRS Gold Medal (2009), the Herbert Walter Prize of the German Physical Society and the Optical Society of America (2010), and the Nobel Prize in Physics (2012, jointly awarded to David J. Wineland).

Serge Haroche’s main research activities have been in quantum optics and quantum information science. Serge Haroche has made important contributions to Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics (Cavity QED), the domain of quantum optics which studies the behaviour of atoms interacting strongly with the field confined in a high-Q cavity. An atom-photon system isolated from the outside world by highly reflecting metallic walls realizes a very simple experimental model, which Serge Haroche has used to test fundamental aspects of quantum physics such as state superposition, entanglement, complementarity and decoherence. Some of these experiments are actual realizations in the laboratory of the “thought experiments” imagined by the founding fathers of quantum mechanics (such as Schrödinger cat states).