During the 1980s Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and his co-laureates developed methods of using laser light to cool gases and keeping the chilled atoms floating or captured in different kinds of “atom traps”. Individual atoms could then be studied with very great accuracy and their inner structure could be determined. This method has increased our knowledge of the interplay between radiation and matter.
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, December 1997.
Photo from the Lars Åström archive