Professor
William D. Phillips – Nobel Laureate

1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics
for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

William D. Phillips received the B.S. in Physics from Juniata College in 1970 and the Ph.D. from MIT in 1976. After two years as a Chaim Weizmann postdoctoral fellow at MIT, he joined the staff of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (then the National Bureau of Standards) in 1978. He is a NIST Fellow, leader of the Laser Cooling and Trapping Group in the Atomic Physics Division of NIST's Physics Laboratory, and is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1997, Dr.Phillips shared the Nobel Prize in Physics "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light."

For a more complete biography, see:
http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1997/phillips-autobio.html

National Institute of Standards and Technology
Atomic Physics Division
Gaithersburg, MD 20899, U.S.A.

Email: william.phillips@nist.gov

LECTURE

"Almost Absolute Zero:
The Story of Laser Cooling and Trapping"

Wednesday, February 4, 2004 at 3:00 - 4:30 p.m. in GC Ballroom


Florida International University (FIU)
Graham Center Ballroom
11200 SW 8th Street, Miami, FL
(Enter FIU through SW 107th Avenue and SW 16th Street)

Abstract: Contrary to intuition, we can cool down a gas by shining a laser on it. This lecture will describe how laser cooling works, and why it works better than anyone had expected it to. We can now cool a gas of atoms to less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero--the coldest temperatures in the universe. Atoms this cold exhibit weird and wonderful properties and are being used for applications ranging from super-accurate atomic clocks to new quantum devices like atom lasers.