Serge Haroche was born in 1944 in Casablanca, Morocco and works at the Collège de France and École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2012 for developing experimental methods to measure and manipulate individual quantum systems. Using a trap made of mirrors, Haroche was able to capture photons and study their interactions with atoms by passing atoms through the trap, enabling research on quantum phenomena that had previously only been examined theoretically.