Serge Haroche
active c. 1944, Casablanca, Morocco
French physicist who pioneered cavity quantum electrodynamics — trapping and counting photons without destroying them.
Haroche's Paris group (ENS, Collège de France) built niobium-mirror cavities storing photons for a tenth of a second. He sent Rydberg atoms across the cavity like 'butterflies' to read the photon number without absorbing it, directly observing quantum jumps and creating 'Schrödinger cat' states of the electromagnetic field.
Nobel-winning work
The Nobel recognized Haroche's cavity-QED experimental methods: quantum non-demolition (QND) counting of photons with Rydberg atoms, quantum feedback stabilizing Fock states, and field 'Schrödinger cats' — paradigmatic tools for quantum control and quantum information.
Workplaces: Collège de France, École Normale Supérieure
France