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School opening and keynote lecture
Prof Alain Aspect, Nobel Prize in Physics, will open the school, and Prof Anne-Marie Lagrange, academician and astrophysicist, will give the keynote lecture. See details below.
Prof Anne-Marie Lagrange to give the keynote lecture
Anne-Marie Lagrange is an academician and astrophysicist. During her thesis, she participated in the discovery of beta Pictoris comets, a star surrounded by a disk of dust. This discovery offered, several years before the discovery of the first exoplanet (planet outside the solar system) in 1996, chances to study extra-solar planetary systems.
Her entire career is dedicated to the research and study of these extrasolar planetary systems and her team obtained the first images of extrasolar planets. Anne-Marie Lagrange has had numerous responsibilities at the French national level, such as deputy director of the CNRS Institute of Universe Sciences and coordinator of the CNRS interdisciplinary program “Origin of planets and life”. At the international level, she notably participated in the development of instruments to equip the very large telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), located in the Atacama Desert (Chile). She has been CNRS research director at the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble (IPAG), which she joined in 1990. In 2009, Anne-Marie Lagrange and a worldwide team discovered beta Pictoris b using direct imaging with adaptive optics. In 2019, they announced the discovery of the giant planet Beta Pictoris c, using spectroscopy, that was equivalent to 9 Jovian masses. This new discovery could help scientists better understand the formation of planetary systems and their evolution in the early stages.
Anne-Marie Lagrange is since 2020 with the Observatoire de Paris-LESIA and Professor at the PSL (Paris Sciences & Lettres) University.
Anne-Marie Lagrange has had numerous honours including the CNRS Bronze Medal in 1994. In 2011, she received the insignia of Knight of the Legion of Honor and was, the same year, the winner of the Irène Joliot-Curie prize in the “Woman Scientist of the Year” category. Created in 2001 by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research and supported by the EADS Corporate Foundation, this prize is intended to promote the place of women in research and technology in France. The scientific aura of this prize has been reinforced since 2011 by a partnership with the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Technologies. In December 2013, she received the Woman of Innovation trophy and the “Women in Gold” public trophy, a prize which highlights the talents of exceptional women, who, each in their field, contribute to promoting the place of women in society. In 2021, Anne-Marie Lagrange received the insignia of the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor.
Text translated and adapted from a Femmes et sciences document and from Anne-Marie Lagrange’s wiki
Prof Alain Aspect, Nobel Prize in Physics 2022, to open the school
Alain Aspect, Nobel Prize in Physics 2022, will kindly open the summer school with a presentation of his research activities, and will also talk about his taste for the transmission of knowledge.
Alain Aspect is a professor at the Institut d’Optique Graduate School (“SupOptique”), holder of the Augustin Fresnel chair (supported by Nokia Bell labs), and emeritus research director of the CNRS. He is also a professor at the École Polytechnique, an affiliated professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay, and an associate professor at City University of Hong Kong (member of the Institute for Advanced Studies).
He is a member of the Quantum Gas group at the Charles Fabry Laboratory (Université Paris Saclay/Institut d'Optique/CNRS).
Alain Aspect's experimental work focuses on situations where the predictions of quantum mechanics are very far from intuition. We can thus cite:
· The experimental tests of Bell's inequalities (state thesis, 1983, with postgraduate students Philippe Grangier and Jean Dalibard), which demonstrated the astonishing properties of quantum entanglement, and invalidated the local realistic vision of the world defended by Einstein;
· The experimental demonstration of particle wave duality for a single photon (1986, with his doctoral student Philippe Grangier), made possible by the invention and creation of the first source of single photons; work extended by Wheeler's delayed choice experiment (2008, Vincent Jacques, Jean-François Roch);
· Laser cooling of atoms under the recoil of a single photon (1987, with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji);
· The Bose-Einstein condensation of metastable helium (2000, with Antoine Browaeys and Chris Westbrook) and its use in Quantum Atomic Optics (observation of the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect for bosonic and fermionic atoms, of the Hong effect Or and Mandel, of pairs of atoms entangled in impulse);
· Anderson's localization of ultracold atoms in a disordered optical potential (2007, with Philippe Bouyer, Laurent Sanchez-Palencia and Vincent Josse).
This work contributed to the emergence of quantum technologies, in particular quantum cryptography and quantum simulators and computers. Alain Aspect is also passionate about teaching, and an author of several MOOCs and a book on quantum optics.
Text translated from the Laboratoire Charles Fabry website.
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