Wolfgang Ketterle

Wolfgang Ketterle

Wolfgang Ketterle (born October 21, 1957 in Heidelberg ) is a German physicist , university professor and Nobel Prize winner .

Life

Wolfgang Ketterle was born in 1957 as the second of three children and grew up in Eppelheim . After graduating from the Bunsen-Gymnasium in Heidelberg , he began studying physics at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in 1976 . After completing his intermediate diploma, he moved to the Technical University of Munich . He took the direction of theoretical physics and graduated in 1982 on the spin relaxation of disordered materials, then he switched to the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich to Herbert Walther and joined Herbert Walther in 1986 work spectroscopy on Heliumhydrid and the triatomic hydrogen molecule PhD .

After his time in Garching, Ketterle moved back to Heidelberg to carry out investigations on combustion engines at Jürgen Wolfrum's chair . In 1990 he changed his field of work again and moved to America to work on problems with laser cooling in David E. Pritchard's group . In 1993 he joined the Physics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and now holds the John D. MacArthur Chair in Physics.

plant

During his doctorate, Ketterle succeeded in demonstrating the existence of helium hydride (HeH) and in obtaining spectra of this molecule for the first time. During his postdoc time in Garching he was also able to fully explain the HeH spectra - Herbert Walther later summarized this achievement in the sentence: “He created an area and killed it at the same time”.

In 1995 he was one of the first to succeed in generating a Bose-Einstein condensate , and in 1997 he demonstrated an atomic laser for the first time . Together with Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 “for the generation of the Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases from alkali atoms and for early fundamental studies on the properties of the condensates”.

Awards and honors

• 1996: David and Lucile Packard Fellowship
• 1997: Rabipreis , American Physical Society
• 1997: Fellow of the American Physical Society
• 1997: Gustav Hertz Prize , German Physical Society
• 1998: Discover Magazine Award for Technical Innovations
• Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999
• 1999: Fritz London Prize for Low Temperature Physics
• 1999: Dannie Heineman Prize , Academy of Sciences, Göttingen
• 2000: Benjamin Franklin Medal for Physics
• 2001: Member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences
• 2001: Nobel Prize in Physics
• 2002: Member of the National Academy of Sciences
• 2002: Large Federal Cross of Merit with star and shoulder ribbon
• 2002: Merit Medal of the State of Baden-Württemberg
• 2004: MIT Killian Award
• 2005: Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , since 2008 National Academy of Sciences
• 2009: Leonie Wild Medal
• 2011: Foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Web links

Commons : Wolfgang Ketterle  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 2001 award ceremony for Wolfgang Ketterle (English)
• Literature by and about Wolfgang Ketterle in the catalog of the German National Library
• Website of Wolfgang Ketterle at the Physics Department. mit.edu(English). 
• Atomic Quantum Gases @ MIT. (English, Ketterle Group homepage). 
• Hajo Schumacher: Typically German: Interview with Wolfgang Ketterle. In: DW-TV . January 15, 2011 (played on YouTube, 7:14 pm). 
• A New Form of Matter: Bose-Einstein Condensation and the Atom Laser. 1998(English, transparencies and audio recording of a general lecture by Wolfgang Ketterle about Bose-Einstein condensates). 
• Wolfgang Ketterle: The Coolest Use of Light: Studying the Coldest Matter in the Universe. 2018 (English, public lecture in Aspen). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Member entry of Wolfgang Ketterle (with picture and CV) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on July 15, 2016.