Jean Brossel

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

Brossel passed the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure (ENS ) in 1938, but then was for two years a soldier. 1941 to 1945 he studied at the ENS in Alfred Kastler and then went to the group of Tolansky in Manchester until 1951 to Francis Bitter to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1951 he received his doctorate in Paris in Kastler with a thesis on the application of the developed by him and Kastler double resonance methods to study the excited states of mercury atoms, which he had performed at MIT. After that, he was attaché and then Maitre de Recherche of the CNRS. In 1955 he became a professor at the Faculté des Sciences in Paris (later at the University Pierre and Marie Curie ( Paris VI University ) ) and was also twelve years from 1973 to 1985 as Director of the Physics Faculty of the ENS. In 1985 he went to the University of Paris in retirement.

Brossel is ( Kastler received for the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physics ) for his investigations of optical pumping with Alfred Kastler known, with whom he founded in 1951 the spectroscopic laboratory at ENS ( Laboratoire de Spectroscopie hertzienne ), now called Laboratoire Kastler - Brossel. He was the co- director and in 1972 director Kastlers resignation.

A place in his home town of Périgueux is named after him.

In 1960 he received (similar to the German Max -Born - price) the Holweck price which is awarded by the British and French Physics Society alternately French and English physicist. Since 1977 he was a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the Prix Ampere he received. In 1984 he received the Gold Medal of the CNRS. The Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in 1990 awarded him an honorary doctorate.