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I was born on 5 November 1948 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, just across the river from the town of Kingston, where my parents lived with my one and a half year old sister, Maxine. My parents had come to this small Pennsylvania town from places and backgrounds that were far apart and yet quite similar. My…

Swedish 15 oktober 1997 har beslutat att utdela 1997 års Nobelpris i fysik gemensamt till Professor Steven Chu, Stanford University, Stanford, Kalifornien, USA, Professor Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Collège de France och École Normale Supérieure, Paris, Frankrike, och Dr. William D. Phillips, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, för utveckling av metoder att kyla…

  Editors: Solgerd Björn-Rasmussen and Margareta Wiberg Roland, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Authors: Prof. Carl Nordling, Uppsala University, Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Dr. Anders Kastberg, Stockholm University. Layout : Andreas Lilius, Typoform. Printed by: Tryckindustri 1997. Copyright © , Information Department, Box 50005, S-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden, Tel.…

    There is a limit for how cold atoms can get with Doppler cooling. In 1988 Phillips developed a time-of-flight method for measuring, and showed that the temperature was considerably below the Doppler limit. Apparently there were other cooling mechanisms at work in the optical molasses.   Time-of-flight method The six laser beams are…

(press release), The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Cooling and Trapping Atoms, by W.D. Phillips and H.J. Metcalf, Scientific American, Marh 1987, p. 36 New Mechanisms for Laser Cooling, by C. N. Cohen-Tannoudji and W. D. Phillips, Physics Today, October 1990, p. 33 Laser Trapping of Neutral Particles, by S. Chu, Scientific American, February 1992,…

  Light acts mechanically on material objects, which means it can change their positions and velocities. This mechanical action of light is used in laser cooling and trapping to reduce the velocity spread for a collection of atoms (cooling), or to confine the atoms in a small volume (trapping). A breakthrough was achieved in the…

Presentation Speech by Professor Bengt Nagel of the , December 10, 1997. Translation of the Swedish text. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics jointly to three physicists for “development of methods to cool and trap atoms with…