Amir Bernat · CC BY-SA 4.0

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Chu and William Phillips for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with lasers, slowing them down enough to study in detail. He was the first to demonstrate that atoms could be cooled below the recoil-temperature limit that laser cooling was thought to face, work carried out at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he has spent most of his career.