He also attended lectures by Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who taught at the Collège de France, and courses by Alfred Kastler and others at the ENS.

In 1946 he graduated from the ENS and from 1947 he was an engineer with the national space research organization ONERA.

In 1951 he received his doctorate under the supervision of André Guinier, with the thesis titled Application des sondes électroniques à une méthode d'analyse ponctuelle chimique et cristallographique (Application of electron probes to local chemical and crystallographic analysis).

In the late 1950s he was also involved in the development of secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) (with his student Georges Slodzian).

From 1959 he was a professor at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, where he founded the Laboratory for Solid State Physics with Jacques Friedel and others.