|
|
Physical Society Colloquium
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
Collège de France
&
Laboratoire Kastler
Brossel
École Normale Supérieure
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji was born in 1933. He completed his Ph.D. with
Professors Kastler and Brossel in 1962 at École Normale
Supérieure in Paris. He then occupied a position of Professor at
the University of Paris from 1964 to 1973. Since 1973, he has been Professor of
Atomic and Molecular Physics at the Collège de France in Paris. He
is a member of the French Académie des Sciences. He is Foreign
Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, of the Académie Royale of Belgium, of the
Accademia dei Lincei of Italy, of the Pontifical Academy, of the Russian
Academy of Sciences, and of the National Academy of Science of India.
Among other distinctions, he has received the Ampère Prize of
the Académie des Sciences, the Thomas Young Medal and Prize of
the Institute of Physics, a Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation, the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the
Charles Townes Award of the Optical Society of America, the Matteucci Medal
of the Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze, the Harvey Prize in Science and
Technology of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, the Quantum
Electronics Prize of the European Physical Society, and the Gold Medal of
the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is Doctor Honoris
Causa of the universities of Uppsala, Jerusalem, Bar Ilan, Sussex, Recife,
Brussels, Liège, Pékin, and Tel Aviv. He shared the 1997 Nobel
Prize in Physics with William D. Phillips and Steven Chu. He has been invited
to give series of lectures in several Universities in Europe, United States,
Canada, Israel, India, China, Indonesia, Korea, and Brasil.
He has written 3 books published by John Wiley: a two-volume book on
`Quantum Mechanics' with Bernard Diu and Franck Laloë;
an introduction to quantum electrodynamics `Photon and Atoms'
with Jacques Dupont-Roc and Gilbert Grynberg; a book on `Atom Photon
Interactions', also with Jacques Dupont-Roc and Gilbert Grynberg. He
has published a collection of selected reprints `Atoms in Electromagnetic
Fields', edited by World Scientific, and, more recently, a book on
`Lévy statistics and laser cooling - How rare events bring atoms
to rest', edited by Cambridge University Press and written with Alain
Aspect, François Bardou, and Jean-Philippe Bouchaud.
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 behaviour
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...
Public Lecture
Thursday, October 14th 2004, 20:00
Moyse Hall, Arts Building
Manipulating Atoms with Light
Understanding the nature of light and its interactions with matter has always
been a challenge for Physics. The light emitted or absorbed by atoms is not
only a valuable source of information on the structure of the world which
surrounds us; it is also a powerful tool for acting on atoms, for
manipulating them, for controlling their various degrees of freedom. It will
be shown how it is possible to use the basic conservation laws in atom-photon
interactions for polarizing atoms, for cooling them to very low temperatures,
in the microkelvin, and even in the nanokelvin range. A review will be given
of recent developments in this field, including atomic clocks with atomic
fountains, the realization of new states of matter such as Bose-Einstein
condensates, matter waves and atom lasers. New perspectives opened by these
results will be also briefly discussed.
Scientific Lecture
Friday, October 15th 2004, 15:30
Room M1, Strathcona Building
Ultracold Bosonic and Fermionic Gases
Laser cooling and trapping methods, combined with magnetic trapping and
evaporative cooling, now allow atomic gases to be cooled at very low
temperatures, in the nanokelvin range, and to reach the quantum degenerate
regime where the mean distance between atoms becomes smaller than the de
Broglie wavelength. Recent developments in this field will be described, for
both bosonic and fermionic atoms. It will be shown how it is possible to
observe in such dilute systems, about 100000 times more dilute than air,
effects which, up to now, have been investigated only in condensed matter.
|