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. According to former director of the school, Jean Zinn-Justin, the school is the "mother of all modern schools of physics”.
Since 2017, it is a Joint Research 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).
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 a post-World War II effort to improve the standard of modern physics in Europe, which was lagging behind the United States. She was inspired by her experience in the Girl Scouts and 1949 Richard Feynman's Ann Arbor annual Summer Symposium, at the University of Michigan, which DeWitt-Morette attended.
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 in charge of the French Ministry of Education. With a reduced budget, she settled to open the school in a rustic farm surrounded by chalets, a few kilometers from the village of Les Houches.
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. 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. DeWitt-Morette also obtained international support from J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Julian Schwinger and Victor Weisskopf.
The first session in 1951 was attended by young French professors like, Alfred Kastler and, as well as by famous physicists from abroad including Walter Heitler, Léon van Hove, Emilio Segrè, Walter Kohn and Wolfgang Pauli. The first lessons were given by Van Hove on quantum mechanics.
Up until the 1960s, the students at the school were cut off from the outside world with the bare minimum in amenities. Nobel laureate Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, a student in 1955, recalled
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". Subsequently, a number of scientific summer schools opened all over Europe following the same model, partly with the support of Advanced Study Institutes program of NATO.
In its early years, it caused some political controversy, with the French Communist Party accusing the school of US espionage and interference. A counter-school project against the allegedly Americanized Les Houches school was considered but was short-lived.
In 1977, a physics centre was created, specialised for shorter conferences which could take place all year round. In 1988, a pre-doctoral school was opened for young researchers entering into their PhD theses.[4]
This table records attendees who later went on to receive either the Nobel Prize in Physics or the Fields Medal.[5]
| 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 | |
| 1999, 2010 | Nobel Prize in Physics | 2001 | ||
| 1951, 1967 | 1998 | |||
| 1964 | Nobel Prize in Physics | 1955 | ||
| 1975 | Nobel Prize in Physics | 1957 | ||
| 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 | |
| 2003 | Nobel Prize in Physics | 2022 |
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:
| 2019 | Francesca Ferlaino | University of Innsbruck | Cold atomic gases[6] | |
| 2020 | Juan Maldacena | Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University | Quantum gravity, string theory and quantum field theory[7] | |
| 2021 | Frédéric Caupin | Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 | Water under extreme conditions of pressure and temperature[8] | |
| 2023 | Nathalie Picqué | Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics | Experimental optics, molecular physics and spectroscopy[9] |