Bio

Born in 1947, Alain Aspect is an alumni of ENS Cachan and Université d'Orsay. He has held positions at Institut d'Optique, ENS Yaoundé (Cameroon), ENS Cachan, ENS/Collège de France, CNRS. He is currently a professor at Institut d'Optique Graduate School (Augustin Fresnel chair), and at Ecole Polytechnique, in Palaiseau. He is a member of several science academies in France, USA, Austria, Belgium, UK. Among several awards, he has received the CNRS Gold medal (2005), the Wolf Prize in Physics (2010), the Balzan prize on quantum information (2013), the Niels Bohr Gold medal (2013), the Albert Einstein medal (2013), the Ives medal of the Optical society of America (2013). Alain Aspect research has borne on tests of Bell's inequalities with entangled photon (PhD, 1974-1983), wave-particle duality for single photons (1984-86, with Philippe Grangier); laser cooling of atoms with lasers below the one photon recoil (1985-1992, with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji); ultra-cold atoms, quantum gases, and quantum simulators (1992- , in the Atom Optics group he has established at Institut d'Optique).