Les Houches School of Physics

Coordinates: 45°53′56″N 6°46′12″E / 45.8989°N 6.7701°E / 45.8989; 6.7701
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Summer, 1972, discussion in main lecture hall. From left, Yuval Ne'eman, Bryce DeWitt, Kip Thorne, Demetrios Christodoulou.

Les Houches School of Physics (French: École de physique des Houches) is an international physics center dedicated to seasonal schools and workshops. It is located in Les Houches, France. The school was founded in 1951 by French scientist Cécile DeWitt-Morette.[1]

Between its participants there have been famous Nobel laureates in Physics like Enrico Fermi, Wolfgang Pauli, Murray Gell-Mann and John Bardeen amongst others.[1] According to former director of the school, Jean Zinn-Justin, the school is the "mother of all modern schools of physics”.[1]

Since 2017, it is a Joint Research Service (French: Unité mixte de service, UMS) of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Grenoble Alpes University.[2] In 2020, it was recognized as a EPS Historic Site by the European Physical Society (EPS).[1]

History[edit]

The school was founded by Cécile DeWitt-Morette in 1951. She was 29 years old at the time, had married physicist Bryce DeWitt a week before, and was still a postdoctoral researcher in the United States.[3] The school was created as an after World War II effort to improve the level of modern physics in Europe, that was lagging behind the United States.[1] She was inspired by her experience at the girls scouts and 1949 Richard Feynman's Ann Arbor annual Summer Symposium, at the University of Michigan, which DeWitt-Morette attended.[3]

She quickly gathered the institutional and financial support of Pierre Victor Auger (then director of the Natural Sciences Department at UNESCO), the CNRS, Albert Châtelet (dean of faculty of physics of the University of Paris) and Pierre Donzelot [fr] in charge of the French Ministry of Education.[3] With a reduced budget, she settled to open the school in a rusty farm surrounded by chalets, a few kilometers from the village of Les Houches.[3]

The school was publicized by her French colleagues: Yves Rocard at the École normale supérieure, Louis Leprince-Ringuet at École polytechnique, Louis de Broglie and Alexandre Proca at the Institut Henri Poincaré, and Francis Perrin at the Collège de France and CEA who hired a secretary to handle the paperwork.[3] Louis Néel acquired the patronage of the Grenoble faculty of science in order for the school to be legally attached to the University of Grenoble.[3] DeWitt-Morette also obtained international support from J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Julian Schwinger and Victor Weisskopf.[3]

The first session in 1951 was attended by young French professors like Pierre Grivet [fr], Alfred Kastler and Théo Kahan [fr], as well as by famous physicists from abroad including Walter Heitler, Léon van Hove, Emilio Segrè, Walter Kohn and Wolfgang Pauli.[3] The first lessons were given by Van Hove on quantum mechanics.[1]

Up until the 1960s, the students at the school were cut off from the outside world with the bare minimum in amenities.[3] Nobel laureate Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, a student in 1955, recalled[3]

It was extremely spartan ... We were lodged in small wooden chalets, barely furnished. The classroom was an old chalet slightly below. We sat on canvas chairs, the chalkboard was primitive, discussions happened outside, on the pastures. It was rough, but at the same time very charming, very bonne franquette, an extremely pleasant atmosphere.[4]

Yves Rocard and Maurice Lévy, inspired by the school, founded a summer school in Cargèse, Corsica, which they called the '‘Les Houches on the beach".[3] Subsequently, more scientific summer school opened all over Europe following the same model, partly with the support of Advanced Study Institutes program of NATO.[3]

In its early years, it caused some controversy in politics, with the French Communist Party accusing the school of US espionage and interference.[3] A counter-school project against the allegedly Americanized Les Houches school was considered but it was short-lived.[3]

In 1977, a physics centre was created specialised for shorter conferences, all year round. In 1988, a pre-doctoral school was opened for young researchers entering into their PhD theses.[5]

Attendees[edit]

This table records attendees who later went on to receive either the Nobel Prize in Physics or the Fields Medal.[6]

Attendee Year(s) attended Prize Year prize awarded
Pierre Agostini 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics 2023
Philip W. Anderson 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics 1977
Alain Aspect 1982, 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics 2022
John Bardeen 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics 1956, 1972
Nicolaas Bloembergen 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics 1981
Aage Bohr 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics 1975
Owen Chamberlain 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics 1959
Steven Chu 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics 1997
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji 1955, 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics 1997
Alain Connes 1970 Fields Medal 1982
Leon Neil Cooper Nobel Prize in Physics 1972
Eric Allin Cornell 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics 2001
François Englert 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics 2013
Enrico Fermi 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics 1938
Albert Fert 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics 2007
Richard Feynman 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics 1965
Roy J. Glauber 1954, 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics 2005
Murray Gell-Mann 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics 1969
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes 1953, 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics 1991
David Gross 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics 2004
F. Duncan M. Haldane 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics 2016
Serge Haroche 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics 2012
Gerardus t'Hooft 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics 1999
J. Hans D. Jensen 1953 Nobel Prize in Physics 1963
Alfred Kastler 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics 1966
Wolfgang Ketterle 1999, 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics 2001
Walter Kohn 1951, 1967 Nobel prize in Chemistry 1998
Willis Lamb 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics 1955
Tsung-Dao Lee 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics 1957
Anthony James Leggett 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics 2003
Anne L'Huillier 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics 2023
Syukuro Manabe 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics 2021
Arthur Bruce McDonald 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics 2003
Ben Roy Mottelson 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics 1975
Gérard Mourou 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics 2018
Louis Néel 1956, 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics 1970
Giorgio Parisi 2013, 2020, 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics 1970
Wolfgang Pauli 1951, 1952, 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics 1945
James Peebles 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics 2019
Roger Penrose 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics 2020
Arno Allan Penzias 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics 1978
William Daniel Phillips 1999, 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics 1997
Norman Foster Ramsey 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics 1989
Abdus Salam 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics 1979
Emilio Gino Segrè 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics 1959
Brian P. Schmidt 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics 2011
John Robert Schrieffer 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics 1972
Julian Schwinger 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics 1965
William Bradford Shockley 1953 Nobel Prize in Physics 1956
Stanislav Smirnov 2010 Fields Medal 2010
Jack Steinberger 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics 1988
René Thom Fields Medal 1958
Kip Thorne 1963, 1966, 1972, 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics 2017
David Thouless 1998, 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics 2016
Charles Hard Townes 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics 1964
Martinus Veltman 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics 1999
Eugene Wigner 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics 1963
Ken Wilson 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics 1982
Ed Witten Fields Medal 1990
C.N. Yang 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics 1957
Anton Zeilinger 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics 2022

Prize[edit]

The Cecile DeWitt-Morette, Ecole de Physique des Houches Prize is awarded annually since 2019. It is awarded to scientists, less than 55 year old, from any nationality, who has made a remarkable contribution to physics and have attended the school as a lecturer or student. The jury is composed of members of the French Academy of Sciences. Since 2023, it is called the Cécile DeWitt-Morette / Ecole de Physique des Houches / Fundation CFM for Research prize.

The laureates are:

Year Laureate Institution Field
2019 Francesca Ferlaino University of Innsbruck Cold atomic gases[7]
2020 Juan Maldacena Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University Quantum gravity, string theory and quantum field theory[8]
2021 Frédéric Caupin Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 Water under extreme conditions of pressure and temperature[9]
2023 Nathalie Picqué Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics Experimental optics, molecular physics and spectroscopy[10]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d e f van Tiggelen, Bart (13 October 2020). "École de Physique des Houches has become EPS Historic Site". European Physical Society. Retrieved 2023-12-20.
  2. ^ Alpes, Université Grenoble. "La nouvelle unité mixte de service". Newsroom - Université Grenoble Alpes (in French). Retrieved 2023-12-20.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Verschueren, Pierre (2019). "Cécile Morette and the Les Houches summer school for theoretical physics; or, how Girl Scouts, the 1944 Caen bombing and a marriage proposal helped rebuild French physics (1951–1972)". The British Journal for the History of Science. 52 (4): 595–616. doi:10.1017/S0007087419000505. ISSN 0007-0874.
  4. ^ Archimède (television show), Arte, 30 October 2001.
  5. ^ Rivet, Sophie. "History of the School". Ecole des Houches. Retrieved 2023-12-20.
  6. ^ Peyla, Philippe. "Nobel Prizes and Fields Medalists". Ecole des Houches. Retrieved 2023-12-20.
  7. ^ Peyla, Philippe. "2019 Prize: Francesca Ferlaino". Ecole des Houches. Retrieved 2023-12-20.
  8. ^ Peyla, Philippe. "2020 Prize: Juan Martin Maldacena". Ecole des Houches. Retrieved 2023-12-20.
  9. ^ Peyla, Philippe. "2021 Prize: Frédéric Caupin". Ecole des Houches. Retrieved 2023-12-20.
  10. ^ Peyla, Philippe. "2023 Prize: Nathalie Picque". Ecole des Houches. Retrieved 2023-12-20.

External links[edit]

45°53′56″N 6°46′12″E / 45.8989°N 6.7701°E / 45.8989; 6.7701

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