Ayant received the first Paul Langevin Prize in 1957 and his books have been used as teaching texts in several universities, and been translated for use as textbooks.

Ayant studied at the École normale supérieure (Paris) from 1946 and received his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1954 with a dissertation on nuclear physics entitled Contribution à l'étude des formes et largeurs de raies dans les résonances nucléaires.

[1] To obtain the agrégation, in 1950 Yves Ayant started working in the team led by Pierre Grivet on a thesis, and in 1954, a jury with Alfred Kastler and Louis Néel defended the dissertation.

[1][3] Ayant was particularly interested in the shapes and displacements of lines, which led him to introduce the notion of a correlation function of a quantum variable, whose main properties he established simultaneously with the Japanese physicist Ryogo Kubo, but independently.

According to Élie Belorizki and Pierre Aberbuch, Yves Ayant published his work in the Journal de Physique, in French, while Kubo did so in English, which explains why the latter is more often cited.