French physicist Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, has died at the age of 93. Cohen-Tannoudji shared the Nobel with Steven Chu and William D. Phillips for his work on cooling and trapping atoms with laser light, a technique that opened the door to manipulating individual atoms at ultralow temperatures.

Cohen-Tannoudji's work was key to understanding how atoms interact with intense electromagnetic fields. His theoretical and experimental developments laid the foundations of quantum optics and enabled later advances in Bose-Einstein condensates, precision atomic clocks and quantum computing. The scientific community mourns the loss of one of the great names of 20th-century atomic physics.