Physicist Eric Cornell, who was involved in the first demonstration of the long-sought Bose-Einstein condensate, is this year's winner of the National Science Foundation's prestigious Alan T. Waterman Award for young researchers.
WHEN the 2001 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman from JILA in Boulder, Colorado, and to Wolfgang Ketterle from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they were recognized for creating and studying Bose–Einstein condensates – dilute gases of atoms that are all in the same quantum state. Their remarkable achievement enabled "quantum gases" to be studied experimentally for the first time, and jump-started new sub-fields of research, including gaseous superfluidity, atom lasers and matter–wave optics.
The winners of 25 research grants worth up to €1.25m over five years were revealed by the European Science Foundation and the heads of Europe's research councils last month. Among those who received a European Young Investigators (EURYI) award, was Jakob Reichel from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, who will set up a research group at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel (LKB) at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris to study Bose–Einstein condensation on nanofabricated chips.