| 1 | Name: | Dr. Jean Dalibard | |
| Institution: | Collège de France | ||
| Year Elected: | 2018 | ||
| Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 106. Physics | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1958 | ||
Jean Dalibard was educated at Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, where he completed a Ph.D. in 1986 with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. He worked at the French Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) for the first part of his carrier, before joining Collège de France in 2012 where he holds the chair Matter and Radiation. He has also been a Professor at Ecole polytechnique for more than 20 years. Dalibard’s scientific work is concerned with atomic physics and optics, more specifically with the control of the motion of atoms with light. The starting point of this research field is quite paradoxical: by shining laser beams on a gas, it is possible to cool it to extremely low temperatures, less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero. Such a low temperature can give rise to novel states of matter whose behavior, governed by Quantum Mechanics, is radically different from a normal fluid. Together with Cohen-Tannoudji, Dalibard contributed to the understanding of the mechanisms at the origin of this phenomenon, working notably on Sisyphus cooling and on the magneto-optical trap. Later, Dalibard and his team studied experimentally the properties of these gases when they are set in rotation, and they could observe the nucleation of a lattice of quantized vortices resulting from this circular motion. During the last decade, his research has been focused on the "physics of Flatland", i.e. the specific properties of a fluid when it is constrained to move only in a plane instead of the usual three-dimensional space. The long-term goal of his research is to develop cold atom setups that can emulate other physical systems that are yet poorly understood - in condensed matter physics for example - in order to bring experimental answers to important pending questions. Jean Dalibard has received several awards, notably the Davisson-Germer Prize from the American Physical Society, the Max Born award from the Americal Physical Society and the Prix Jean Ricard form the French Physical Society. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, of the European Academy of Science, the Academia Europaea, and an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been a visiting scientist in a number of places outside France, notably NIST Gaithersburg and Cambridge University in the UK. | |||