Jacqueline Bloch awarded the CNRS Gold Medal
On Thursday 17 September 2026, physicist Jacqueline Bloch was awarded the CNRS Gold Medal, one of France’s most prestigious scientific honours. The award comes with a €50,000 grant from the CNRS Foundation.
A CNRS research director at the Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay) and professor at École polytechnique, Jacqueline Bloch is being recognised for her pioneering work on polaritons, hybrid particles resulting from the coupling of light and matter.
Together with her team, she studies the behaviour of these particles in small cavities measuring just a few micrometres across and designed in various shapes for experimental purposes. In these cavities, polaritons behave like quantum fluids of light¹. These systems provide a way of simulating phenomena such as superfluidity and Bose–Einstein condensates in the laboratory.
She has demonstrated that these polariton microcavities are miniature laboratories for simulating and exploring phenomena from other areas of physics, such as black holes, as well as for investigating the properties of materials such as graphene. Today, Jacqueline Bloch’s research focuses on universal laws that describe phenomena ranging from the formation of frost on glass to the propagation of a fire front, through the study of light emitted by polaritons. Her work is opening up prospects for the development of new types of lasers and for all-optical information processing.
Drawing on her scientific career, Jacqueline Bloch has for many years championed fundamental research as an essential driver of major scientific advances to come. Her work has received numerous distinctions, including the CNRS Silver Medal in 2017 and the Ampère Prize awarded by the French Academy of Sciences in 2019, the same year she became a member of the Academy. She is also a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur and an Officier of the Ordre national du Mérite.
Established in 1954, the CNRS Gold Medal recognises outstanding scientific careers that have made an exceptional contribution to the dynamism and international standing of French research. Alongside the Nobel Prize, which has also been awarded to several of its recipients, it reflects the excellence of French scientific research and its international reach.