Haroche was born in
Casablanca, Morocco, to Albert Haroche (1920–1998), from a
Moroccan Jewish family, and Valentine Haroche, born
Roubleva (1921–1998), a teacher who was born in
Odessa to a Jewish family of physicians who relocated to
Morocco in the early 1920s. His father, a lawyer trained in
Rabat, was one of seven children born to a family of teachers, Isaac and Esther Haroche, who worked at the
École de l’Alliance israélite (AIU).[6][7][8][9][10][11][12]
Both paternal grandparents of Serge Haroche had been AIU students in their respective hometowns of
Marrakesh and
Tétouan (the school which Esther Azerad attended in Tétouan had been founded in 1862; it was the first school of the AIU network).[13]
Haroche left Morocco and settled in France in 1956, at the end of the
French protectorate treaty.
In September 2012, Serge Haroche was elected by his peers to the position of administrator of the Collège de France.
On 9 October 2012 Haroche was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physics, together with the American physicist
David Wineland, for their work regarding measurement and manipulation of individual quantum systems.
After a
PhD dissertation on dressed atoms under the supervision of
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (himself a Nobel Prize recipient) from 1967 to 1971, he developed new methods for
laser spectroscopy, based on the study of
quantum beats and
superradiance. He then moved on to
Rydberg atoms, giant atomic states particularly sensitive to
microwaves, which makes them well adapted for studying the interactions between light and matter. He showed that such atoms, coupled to a
superconducting cavity containing a few
photons, are well-suited to the testing of
quantum decoherence and to the realization of
quantum logic operations necessary for the treatment of
quantum information.
Haroche currently lives in Paris; he is married to the sociologist Claudine Haroche (née Zeligson), also descending from the
Russian Jewish émigrés family, with two children (aged 40 and 43).[25][26][27] He is the uncle of French singer–songwriter and actor
Raphaël Haroche (known as Raphaël, his stage name).[28]
Bibliography
Serge Haroche, Jean-Michel Raimond, Exploring the quantum. Atoms, cavities and photons, Oxford University Press, 2006.
^Sayrin, C. M.; Dotsenko, I.; Zhou, X.; Peaudecerf, B.; Rybarczyk, T. O.; Gleyzes, S. B.; Rouchon, P.; Mirrahimi, M.; Amini, H.; Brune, M.; Raimond, J. M.; Haroche, S. (2011). "Real-time quantum feedback prepares and stabilizes photon number states". Nature. 477 (7362): 73–77.
arXiv:1107.4027.
Bibcode:
2011Natur.477...73S.
doi:
10.1038/nature10376.
PMID21886159.
S2CID4383517.