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The 2026 Rochester Lecture takes place on Monday 18th May

15 May 2026
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Fluorescence images of individual atoms trapped in various optical tweezers arrays. Each point corresponds to an atom.

The 2026 Rochester Lecture will take place on Monday 18 May in Lecture Theatre Ph8 of the Rochester Building. This year's speaker is Antoine Browaeys, a senior staff Scientist at CNRS. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Cachan (France) and did his ph’D under Alain Aspect at the Institut d’Optique (2000). He is working on experiments manipulating individual cold atoms and small, dense atomic clouds.

The title of his lecture is 'Assembling quantum matter one atom at a time'. 

Over the last decade, physicists have learned to assemble "atom by atom" a synthetic quantum matter. Antoine's seminar will present one example based on laser-cooled ensembles of individual atoms trapped in microscopic optical tweezer arrays. By exciting them to Rydberg states, we control their interactions even at micrometer distances. In this way, we study the many-body properties of more than a hundred interacting spins, in a regime where simulations by usual numerical methods are already very challenging when not impossible. Beyond the study of many-body problems, the control gained over the atoms could find applications in metrology and could lead to the development of a quantum computer. Some aspects of this research led to the creation of a company, Pasqal.

Antoine spent two years at NIST in the Laser Cooling group led by W.D. Phillips. He was hired as a scientist at CNRS in 2003. He is working on experiments manipulating individual cold atoms and small, dense atomic clouds. Part of his research led to the creation of the Pasqal company, that he is a co-founder and scientific adviser of.

He was awarded the Aimé Cotton Prize of the French Physical Society in 2007, the Silver medal of CNRS in 2021, and in 2026 the Norman Ramsey Prize of the APS, the Herbert Walther Prize of the DPG, and the John Bell Prize . He was elected member of the French academy of science in decembre 2023.

The Rochester Lecture 2026, 4.00 - 6.00pm, Ph8 Lecture Theatre, Rochester Building

This is a public lecture and everyone is welcome to attend.