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  6. Alain ASPECT
Alain ASPECT
© Jean-François Dars

Alain ASPECT

Personnalité qualifiée désignée par le président de l’ENS Paris-Saclay

Nobel Prize in Physics 2022, Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS, affiliated professor at the ENS Paris-Saclay, professor at the Institut d'Optique Graduate School (IOGS), at the École Polytechnique

He has been an affiliated professor at ENS Paris-Saclay since 2014.

Career

Alain Aspect studied from 1965 to 1969 at ENS Cachan, now ENS Paris-Saclay, and at the Orsay Faculty of Science. At the time, he was working towards a postgraduate doctorate at the Institut d'Optique Théorique et Appliquée (Supoptique) under the supervision of Serge Lowenthal.
In 1971, he defended his post-graduate thesis3, followed by his doctorate in 1983.
In 1984, he was appointed lecturer at the École Polytechnique and deputy laboratory director at the Collège de France (associated with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji's chair of atomic and molecular physics). In the Hertzian Spectroscopy Laboratory at the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, he worked on the "photon recoil" method of cooling atoms by laser, for which Claude Cohen-Tannoudji was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 1992, he was appointed CNRS research director at the Institut d'Optique. He was deputy director of the Institute from 1992 to 1994. He set up a new research group devoted to atomic optics, atomic mirrors and Bose-Einstein condensates.
In 1994, he was also appointed professor at the École Polytechnique.

Alain Aspect is also a member of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Technologies, and a foreign member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts in Belgium, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Italy, the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and the Royal Society in the United Kingdom.

Awards and honours

  • 2022: Nobel Prize in Physics with John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for their work on quantum mechanics
  • 2021: Honorary member of Optica
  • 2005: CNRS gold medal
  • 2013: Balzan Prize
  • 2013: Niels Bohr Medal to mark the centenary of the publication of Niels Bohr's atomic model.
  • 2012: Albert-Einstein Medal.
  • 2010: Wolf Prize in Physics, jointly with the American John F. Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger, for his conceptual and experimental contributions to quantum physics.
  • 2005: CNRS gold medal.
  • 1991: winner of the Holweck Prize in 1991.
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