William Daniel Phillips

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William D. Phillips

William Daniel Phillips (born November 5, 1948 in Wilkes-Barre , Pennsylvania ) is an American physicist . For cooling and trapping atoms with laser light ( laser cooling ) he received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji .

life and work

Phillips has paternal Welsh and maternal Italian origins. He went to school in Camp Hill near Harrisburg and studied from 1966 with a state scholarship from Pennsylvania at Juniata College in Huntingdon ( Bachelor's degree in physics 1970 summa cum laude ) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge , where he attended in 1976 Daniel Kleppner received his doctorate . The topic of the two-part dissertation was the magnetic moment of the proton in water molecules and inelastic scattering of excited sodium. As a post-doctoral student , he was a Chaim Weizmann Fellow at MIT from 1976 to 1978 . From 1978 he was at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg , Maryland . There he developed the laser cooling methods for which he received the Nobel Prize. In 1996 he became a Fellow of NIST. Since 1992 he has been Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland at College Park .

He is one of the pioneers of laser cooling with Steven Chu and Claude Tannoudji. Specifically, he developed the Zeeman-Slower method using the Zeeman effect (1982 with Harold Metcalf ) of neutral atoms in atomic beams, used today, for example, in the run-up to magneto-optical traps in which the atoms are then captured. This method is used in the development of precise atomic clocks , which are used, among other things, to determine exact positions and in space navigation.

He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (1997), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995), the Optical Society of America, and the American Physical Society . In 1996 he received the Michelson Medal from the Franklin Institute and in 1983 the Silver Medal and in 1993 the Gold Medal from the US Department of Commerce . In 1970 he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow . In 1987 he received the Samuel Wesley Stratton Award from NIST and in 1998 the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser Physics .

He has been married to Jane van Wynen since 1970 and has two daughters. As a Methodist he is also involved in the dialogue between religion and science. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

William D. Phillips 2012

Web links

Commons : William Daniel Phillips  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Biographical data based on American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. Metcalf, Phillips laser deceleration of an atomic beam , Physical Review Letters, Volume 48, 1982, pp 596-599, Abstract