Carl Wieman of JILA and the University of Colorado, Eric Cornell of JILA and National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado and Wolfgang Ketterle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will share the 2001 Nobel Prize for Physics for "the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates".
The Bose-Einstein condensate is the state of matter involving thousands to millions of individual atoms all acting in a coordinated way. This "control" of matter, which this technology involves, is foreseen to bring revolutionary applications in such fields as precision measurements and nanotechnology.
Bose-Einstein condensate was first predicted in 1924 by the Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose, and Albert Einstein. In a Bose condensate the de Broglie wavelength of the atoms is comparable with the average interatomic spacing, which causes all the atoms to condense into the same quantum ground state. All the atoms are described by the same quantum wavelength, which gives the condensate many unusual properties.
Back in 1995, Mr. Wieman and Mr. Cornell produced the first Bose-Einstein condensate by cooling 2,000 rubidium atoms to 20 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Mr. Ketterle, four months later, published his results of a Bose-Einstein condensate made from millions of sodium atoms, a grouping big enough to study in detail.
Mr. Wieman, an AAPT member since 1995, is currently teaching a large physics class for non-scientists. Most of his students are CU-Boulder freshmen and all of them plan to major in disciplines other than science. Mr. Wieman is also part of a national task force, formed by all the major physics organizations, that has been established to improve undergraduate physics education. Mr. Wieman has taught undergraduate and graduate students at CU-Boulder since 1984. He is one of 18 faculty members with the title of distinguished professor on the CU-Boulder campus and is a fellow and former chairperson of JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Among Mr. Wieman's numerous awards are the 2000 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, the King Faisal International Prize for Science, the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science, the 1996 Richtmyer Lecture Award from the AAPT, and the 2001 National Science Foundation Distinguished Scholar Teachers Award.