Before joining Yale in 2002 as a Professor in the Applied Physics Department (with a joint appointment in the Physics Department), Michel Devoret was Director of Research of the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) at Saclay.

Michel Devoret graduated from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris in 1975 and did graduate work in molecular quantum physics at the University of Orsay. He then joined Professor Anatole Abragam's laboratory in CEA-Saclay to work on NMR in solid hydrogen and received his Ph.D. from Paris University in 1982. He spent two post-doctoral years working on macroscopic quantum tunneling with John Clarke at the University of California, Berkeley.

Upon his return to Saclay, Dr. Devoret pursued this research on quantum mechanical electronics and started his own research group with Daniel Esteve and Cristian Urbina.


The main achievements of the "quantronics group" are the measurement of the traversal time of tunneling, the invention of the single electron pump (now the basis of a new standard of capacitance), the first direct observation of the charge of Cooper pairs, the first measurement of the effect of atomic valence on the conductance of a single atom, and very recently, the development of a high-coherence superconducting quantum bit.

Michel Devoret has received the Ampère Prize of the French Academy of Science (together with Daniel Esteve), the Descartes-Huygens Prize of the Royal Academy of Science of the Netherlands and the Europhysics-Agilent Prize of the European Physical Society (together with Daniel Esteve, Hans Moij and Yasunobu Nakamura).