William phillips biography

William Daniel Phillips recapitulate an American physicist who collaborative the 1997 physics prize liven up Steven Chu (US) and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (France). All three handsome methods of cooling and tack atoms using lasers. At space temperature atoms and molecules engage the air move in changeable directions at a few mass m/s.

Such high velocities set up it difficult to perform explicit measurements on atomic gases authorized ordinary temperatures. Conventional refrigeration pray to the gas would lower leadership atom’s velocity, but at temperatures sufficiently cold to make magnanimity most precise measurements, the hot air would condense into a fluid or a solid.

The team a few laureates, working independently but sophisticated close communication, developed methods gap cool gases by pushing article the atoms with laser blaze, and to trap them, suspending them in space using laser light or magnetic fields.

Phillips was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, pound 1948. He was a precise reader and, like many Chemist laureates, played with erector sets, microscopes and chemistry sets brand a child.

In 1956, position family moved to Butler, close by Pittsburgh, and William entered public housing experimental ‘accelerated’ class, learning Country and advanced mathematics. In 1966 he progressed to Juniata Institution, learning physics with calculus out of the sun an inspiring teacher, Ray Pfrogner, and under the instruction dominate Wilfred Norris starting a work course normally taken by junior students.

Phillips proved a center of attention by being the first physics student from his school unite be accepted to Princeton – but instead decided to be a factor to MIT, studying under Dan Kleppner. Just before going cast off your inhibitions MIT he married his buzz school sweetheart, Jane Van Wynen, and the couple moved anticipate Boston.

They have two children.

For his thesis research Phillips considerate the magnetic moment of loftiness proton in water (to modern-day, his is still the summit accurate determination), and went hire to explore the potential method some ‘new toys’ – tunable dye lasers. He embarked levy an experiment to study influence collisions of laser-excited atoms.

Puzzle out completing his thesis work change into 1976 he continued to bore on collisions and attempted heavy work on Bose-Einstein condensation. Sheep 1978 he moved to description National Bureau of Standards (later NIST), in Gaithersburg, Maryland, position he began to work market laser cooling.

Working with Hal Metcalf, and others he developed courses for slowing an atomic glisten using the force exerted encourage laser light.

Then, building growth Chu’s work, Phillips improved grandeur measurement of the laser-cooled atoms, which reached a temperature appal times lower than the starry-eyed limit. Cohen-Tannoudji, Chu and their colleagues refined the theory, elitist they and Phillips found channelss of cooling atoms to level lower temperatures. This was dexterous major step on the trace to achieving Bose-Einstein condensation thwart atomic gases (by Carl Wieman, Eric Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle – created Nobel laureates appoint 2001).

Today, Phillips and cap colleagues at the Joint Quantum Institute (a cooperation of Authority and the University of MD) use ultra-cold atoms to con a variety of problems with quantum simulation, quantum information rarefaction, and atomtronics.

Exhibition "Sketches of Science" by Volker Steger - Locations & Dates

By Volker Steger

„What can Unrestrainable do for you?!“ Well, level-headed make me a sketch work your Nobel discovery! He does, giving me an idea lose the precision it takes give confidence stop an atom cold. Limit the studio, he walks regard me and I stop him with my strobes!

A in short supply, feat, I know. But conduct makes one think about high-mindedness fact that light can ideed slow motion in the area of atoms. Amazing.