Jean Brossel

Jean Brossel (15 August 1918 – 4 February 2003) was a French physicist known for his work on quantum optics.

Brossel passed the entrance exam for l'École normale supérieure (ENS) 1938, but then was for two years a soldier.

From 1941 to 1945 he studied at the ENS under Alfred Kastler and then went to the group of Samuel Tolansky in Manchester where he spent the years 1945–1948 before moving in 1948 to Francis Bitter at MIT.

In 1951 for work done at MIT, Brossel received his PhD in Paris under Kastler with a thesis on the application of double resonance methods (developed by Kastler and him) to the study of the excited states of Hg.

In 1960 Brossel won the Holweck Prize and in 1977 he was elected a member of l'Académie des sciences, whose Prix Ampère he received in 1974.