Jean-Michel Raimond
Jean-Michel Raimond is a French physicist working in the field of quantum mechanics.Biography
Raimond enrolled at the École normale supérieure in 1975. After graduating with a DEA in atomic and molecular physics, his first research work was in superradiance and Rydberg atoms.
He became Research Associate and Research Fellow at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, working under Serge Haroche towards his 1984 thesis Propriétés radiatives des atomes de Rydberg dans une cavité résonnante.
Since 1988, he has taught at the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie.
From 1994 to 1999, he was a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France.
From 2001 to 2011, he was a senior member and held the chair of quantum optics.
From 2004 to 2009, he was head of the Department of Physics at the École normale supérieure.
Raimond specialised in atomic physics and quantum optics as a member of the Kastler-Brossel Laboratory in the Groupe d'Électrodynamique Quantique en Cavité, which he ran with the 2012 Nobel Prize winner Serge Haroche and Michel Brune.
He became interested in Rydberg atoms, because their relatively large size and sensitivity to microwave radiation makes them particularly suited to studies of matter/energy interaction. He demonstrated that these atoms, coupled to superconducting cavities containing some photons, are ideal systems for testing the laws of quantum decoherence and for demonstrating the possibility of constructing the components of quantum logic, with promising results for their use in informatics.
His most recent work, quoted in the 2012 Nobel Prize-winning work, allows photons to be counted in the cavity without their being destroyed, thus directly demonstrating the quantum measurement problem. This ideal measure also helps combat quantum decoherence with a quantum feedback scheme which keeps the number of photons in the cavity constant.
Raimond is the son of Michel Raimond, late professor of French literature at the Sorbonne.Awards
