Jean Brossel

Jean Brossel (born August 15, 1918 in Périgueux ; † February 4, 2003 ibid) was a French physicist who dealt with atomic physics and quantum optics .

Brossel passed the entrance exam for the École normal supérieure (ENS) in 1938, but was then initially a soldier for two years. From 1941 to 1945 he studied at the ENS with Alfred Kastler and then went to the Tolansky group in Manchester and until 1951 to Francis Bitter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1951 he received his doctorate in Paris under Kastler with a thesis on the application of the double resonance methods developed by him and Kastler for studying the excited states of mercury atoms , which he had carried out at MIT. Afterwards he was attaché and then maitre de research of the CNRS . In 1955 he became a professor at the Faculté des Sciences in Paris (later at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie (University of Paris VI)) and was also director of the physics faculty of the ENS for twelve years from 1973 to 1985. In 1985 he retired from the University of Paris.

Brossel is known for his investigations into optical pumping with Alfred Kastler (Kastler received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1966 for this ), with whom he founded the spectroscopic laboratory at the ENS (Laboratoire de Spectroscopie Hertzienne) in 1951, which is now called Laboratoire Kastler-Brossel. He was its co-director and director after Kastler's resignation in 1972.

A square is named after him in his hometown Périgueux.

In 1960 he received the Holweck Prize , which is alternately awarded by the English and French Physical Society to French and English physicists (similar to the German Max Born Prize ). Since 1977 he was a member of the French Academy of Sciences , whose Prix ​​Ampère he received. In 1984 he received the CNRS gold medal . The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1990 .

Web links

• Biography at the ENS

Individual evidence

1. ↑ uni-mainz.de: Honorary doctorates