Les Houches School of Physics () 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.

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. In 2020, it was recognized as a EPS Historic Site by the European Physical Society (EPS).

History 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. 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.

Attendees This table records attendees who later went on to receive either the Nobel Prize in Physics or the Fields Medal.

+ Attendee Year(s) attended Prize Year prize awardedPierre Agostini1997Nobel Prize in Physics2023 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 Wolfgang Ketterle 1999, 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics 2001 Walter Kohn 1951, 1967 Nobel prize in Chemistry 1998 Willis Lamb 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics 1955 Tsung-Dao Lee 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics 1957 Anthony James Leggett 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics 2003Anne L'Huillier2016Nobel Prize in Physics2023 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 2021 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 Anton Zeilinger 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics 2022

Prize 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: +YearLaureateInstitutionField2019Francesca FerlainoUniversity of InnsbruckCold atomic gases2020Juan MaldacenaInstitute for Advanced Study, Princeton UniversityQuantum gravity, string theory and quantum field theory2021Frédéric CaupinClaude Bernard University Lyon 1Water under extreme conditions of pressure and temperature2023Nathalie PicquéMax Planck Institute of Quantum OpticsExperimental optics, molecular physics and spectroscopy

References

External links École de Physique des Houches web site