Claude Cohen-Tannoudji The French Nobel laureate devised a way of cooling atoms to near absolute zero. (Courtesy: Amir Bernat/CC BY-SA 4.0)"> Claude Cohen-Tannoudji The French Nobel laureate devised a way of cooling atoms to near absolute zero. (Courtesy: Amir Bernat/CC BY-SA 4.0)

The French physicist and Nobel laureate Claude Cohen-Tannoudji died in Paris on 22 October at the age of 93. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Chu and William Phillips “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”.

Chu and Phillips bagged their shares of the prize for their pioneering experimental work in the 1980s that showed that photon collisions can be used cool atomic gases to temperatures well below 1 mK. Initially, this was understood in terms of a process called Doppler cooling.…