Highlights from e-EPS: Jean-Michel Raimond wins EPS Edison-Volta Prize 2014

e-EPS News is a monthly addition to the CERN Bulletin line-up, showcasing articles from e-EPS – the European Physical Society newsletter – as part of a collaboration between the two publications.

 

The European Physical Society has the pleasure to announce that the 2014 EPS Edison-Volta Prize is awarded to Jean-Michel Raimond for “seminal contribution to physics (that) have paved the way for novel explorations of quantum mechanics and have opened new routes in quantum information processing”.

J.-M. Raimond’s PhD thesis was supervised by Serge Haroche at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, in the early 1980′s, and together S. Haroche, M. Brune and J.-M. Raimond have built an extremely successful research group since then. J.-M. Raimond has made seminal contributions to the development of cavity QED experiments, in particular involving circular Rydberg atoms interacting with very high-Q superconducting cavities. This system has served as test-bed for groundbreaking experiments in exploring entanglement of photons and atoms, or in creating Schrödinger-cat states. One of the group’s most spectacular experiments is the detection of a photon in a cavity without destroying it in the measurement process. In the international scientific community, Jean-Michel Raimond’s work is highly considered for its impact on the understanding of the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with matter, as well as for the elegance and beauty of his experimental realizations.

J.-M. Raimond is professor at Pierre-et-Marie-Curie University in Paris since 1988, in addition he was appointed for a ten-year research position at the prestigious Institut Universitaire de France from 2001-2011 (and is an honorary member since then). He has been awarded the Ampère Prize of the French Academy of Science (together with M. Brune), as well as the Gay-Lussac-Humboldt Award by the German Humboldt foundation. He is an enthusiastic teacher and has also served on different positions for the management and organisation of science and higher education.


This article is from e-EPS News.

by Martina Knoop, e-EPS News