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William D. "Bill" Phillips (1998)

National Institute of Standards and Technology and Technology

Published Jan 1, 1998• 0 citations
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Abstract

William D. "Bill" Phillips is a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He joined NIST in 1978 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. Image source: William D. Phillips biographical file, NIST Archives.

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How cold atoms got hot: an interview with William Phillips

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Abstract William Phillips of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in developing laser methods for cooling and trapping atoms. Interactions between the light field and the atoms create what is dubbed an ‘optical molasses’ that slows the atoms down, thereby reducing their temperature to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero. These techniques allow atoms to be studied with great precision, for example measuring their resonant frequencies for light absorption very accurately, so that these frequencies may supply very stable timing standards for atomic clocks. Besides applications in metrology, such cooling methods can also be used to study new fundamental physics. The 1997 Nobel award was widely considered to be a response to the first observation in 1995 of pure Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC), in which a collection of bosonic atoms all occupy a single quantum state. This quantum-mechanical effect only becomes possible at very low temperatures, and the team that achieved it, working at JILA operated jointly by the University of Colorado and NIST, used the techniques devised by Phillips and others. Since then, cold-atom physics has branched in many directions, among them being attempts to make a quantum computer (which would use logic operations based on quantum rules) from ultracold trapped atoms and ions. ‘National Science Review’ spoke with Phillips about the development and future potential of the field.

National Science Review•Nov 9, 2015•0 citations
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.
NOBEL PRIZESPhysicists nowadays can cool, trap, bounce, and toss atoms with the facility of microscopic jugglers. That facility is due in no small part to techniques developed by three masters of atomic manipulation--Steven Chu of Stanford University, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji of the A‰cole Normale SupA©rieure in Paris, and William Phillips of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland--who have been awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics. Over the last decade, they showed how atoms could be chilled to millionths of a degree above absolute zero and trapped by bombarding them with beams of laser light. The work has proved invaluable for basic physics and has also led to dozens of applications. For more information on this prize, see the [Nobel Foundation Web site][1]. [1]: http://www.nobel.se/announcement-97/physics97.html
Abstract William Phillips of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in developing laser methods for cooling and trapping atoms. Interactions between the light field and the atoms create what is dubbed an ‘optical molasses’ that slows the atoms down, thereby reducing their temperature to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero. These techniques allow atoms to be studied with great precision, for example measuring their resonant frequencies for light absorption very accurately, so that these frequencies may supply very stable timing standards for atomic clocks. Besides applications in metrology, such cooling methods can also be used to study new fundamental physics. The 1997 Nobel award was widely considered to be a response to the first observation in 1995 of pure Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC), in which a collection of bosonic atoms all occupy a single quantum state. This quantum-mechanical effect only becomes possible at very low temperatures, and the team that achieved it, working at JILA operated jointly by the University of Colorado and NIST, used the techniques devised by Phillips and others. Since then, cold-atom physics has branched in many directions, among them being attempts to make a quantum computer (which would use logic operations based on quantum rules) from ultracold trapped atoms and ions. ‘National Science Review’ spoke with Phillips about the development and future potential of the field.