Laser-Cooled Atoms Hit Record Low Temperatures

Sophia Chen

Researchers achieve the lowest temperature yet for laser-cooled

Robert Pool

Alison Goddard

Winning the Nobel prize for physics is like being hit by a tornado, according to one of this year's laureates. "I just wish it would stop so that I could go back to work," says Claude Cohen-Tannoudji of the Collège de France and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He shares the 1997 prize with Steve Chu of Stanford University in California and Bill Phillips of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, for developing techniques to cool and trap atoms at extremely low temperatures using lasers.

Christopher J. Foot, Andrew M. Steane

Uday Kumar Khan

Michael Schirber

A short-lived combination of an electron and an antielectron has been cooled with lasers to near absolute zero-a step toward tackling fundamental questions about matter and antimatter.