Jacqueline Bloch, lecturer at École Polytechnique, receives the CNRS Gold Medal

A lecturer at École Polytechnique since 2015, physicist Jacqueline Bloch was awarded the 2026 CNRS Gold Medal for her work on polaritons and their applications in quantum physics.

Each year, the CNRS Gold Medal honors a scientist whose work has made an exceptional contribution to the prestige of French research. Jacqueline Bloch is being honored for her pioneering research on polaritons, a phenomenon that can occur when light interacts with certain solid materials, such as semiconductors. The light provides energy to the electrons in the material, which begin to move and, in turn, emit light. These collective back-and-forth movements between light and matter are complex. They can be described mathematically as if they were caused by “quasiparticles” known as polaritons.

The physicist’s work focuses in particular on the study of these quantum quasiparticles within microcavities and on the collective phenomena that they make it possible to observe. Her research has contributed to a better understanding of phenomena such as superfluidity and Bose-Einstein condensates and opens up new possibilities in fields such as photonics and all-optical information processing.

Jacqueline Bloch has been an lecturer at École Polytechnique since 2015, where she contributes to student education alongside her research activities at the CNRS. She is also a CNRS research director at C2N, where she leads the “Nanophotonics and Quantum Systems” team, and has been a member of the French Academy of Sciences since 2019.

Jacqueline Bloch joined the CNRS in 1994 after earning a Ph.D. in physics. She conducted a research project at Bell Laboratories in the United States before continuing her work in France. Her career has been recognized with the CNRS Silver Medal in 2017 and the Ampère Prize from the Academy of Sciences in 2019.

The 2026 CNRS Gold Medal thus recognizes a career dedicated to research in quantum physics and the dissemination of knowledge, particularly through his teaching at the École Polytechnique. The award will be presented to him on December 17, 2026, at the Maison de la Chimie in Paris.