Serge Haroche

Serge Haroche (born 1944) is a French physicist, born in Casablanca to a family that left Morocco for France in 1956. He took his doctorate at the University of Paris VI in 1971 under Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, worked for the CNRS at the Kastler-Brossel Laboratory and spent a postdoctoral year with Arthur Schawlow at Stanford. He later headed the physics department of the École normale supérieure and, since 2001, has held the chair of quantum physics at the Collège de France, where he was also elected administrator in 2012. His work in atomic physics and quantum optics includes laser spectroscopy and experiments with Rydberg atoms, and in 1996 his group observed quantum decoherence directly. He shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Wineland for methods of measuring and manipulating individual quantum systems.