Carl Edwin Wieman

Carl Edwin Wieman

Carl Edwin Wieman (born March 26, 1951 in Corvallis , Oregon ) is an American physicist who won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the generation of the Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases from alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies about the properties of the condensates ”was awarded.

Life

Carl Wieman was born on March 26, 1951, the fourth of five children to N. Orr Wieman and Alison Wieman. He grew up in the Oregon forests. Before his seventh year of school, the family moved to Corvallis to enable the children to attend better schools - although the small town only had about 25,000 residents, it is home to Oregon State University .

After high school, he was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1973 . After completing his undergraduate studies, he moved to Stanford University to the chair of Theodor Hänsch , where he received his doctorate in 1977 . He then went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and was appointed assistant professor in 1979. It was there that he met Sarah Gilbert, who worked with him as a student. In 1984 he moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder and married Sarah, who had meanwhile also received her PhD. He has been Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado since 1987.

plant

In Hänsch's group, Wieman dealt with precision measurements of the hydrogen lines , the subject of his doctoral thesis was the measurement of the 1s Lamb shift and the isotope shift of the 1s-2s transition using polarization spectrometry . With his experience in precision spectrometry in Michigan, he wanted to measure the parity violation in atoms predicted by the electroweak interaction theory . However, he quickly realized that cesium offered better possibilities for this than hydrogen - the successful measurement in 1985 brought him first scientific recognition.

In connection with his precision experiments , Wieman has been working with laser cooling and laser traps since 1984 . While at first he was only interested in improving his measurement methods, he soon began to recognize the possibilities of studying the behavior of atoms at very low temperatures - and the possibility of generating a Bose-Einstein condensate , which he worked with in 1995 Eric Cornell succeeded. For this achievement he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 together with Eric Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle in equal shares .

After receiving the Nobel Prize, Wieman put his physics career on hold and devoted himself more to the transfer of scientific knowledge and his method of "active learning".

Awards

• 1984 Sloan Research Fellow
• 1990–1991 Guggenheim scholarship
• 1990 Fellow of the American Physical Society
• 1993 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Prize in Physics
• 1994 Davisson-Germer Prize of the American Physical Society
• 1995 election to the National Academy of Sciences
• 1995 Einstein Medal for Laser Science from the Society for Optical and Quantum Electronics
• 1996 Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers
• 1996 Fritz London Prize for Low Temperature Physics from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics
• 1996 Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• 1997 International König Faisal Prize for Science
• 1997 Science Prize from the Bonfils-Staanton Foundation
• 1998 election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1998 Lorentz Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1999 R. W. Wood Prize from the Optical Society of America
• 1999 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser Physics from the American Physical Society
• 2000 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Physics from the Franklin Institute
• 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics
• 2004 National Professor of the Year of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and The Carnegie Foundation

literature

• Carl E. Wieman , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 02/2002 of December 31, 2001, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of the article freely available)

Web links

Commons : Carl Wieman  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 2001 award ceremony for Carl E. Wieman
• Homepage of Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado

Individual evidence

1. ↑ "Active learning" pedagogical method How (almost) everyone can become a genius In: spiegel.de , edition 7/2018, accessed on February 13, 2018.