Eric A. Cornell

Facts

Eric A. Cornell

Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.

Eric A. Cornell

Born: 19 December 1961, Palo Alto, CA, USA

Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Colorado, JILA, Boulder, CO, USA

Prize motivation: "for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates."

Prize share: 1/3

Work

One of the fundamental numbers in the world of quantum mechanics is the spin quantum number. Particles and atoms that have whole-number spin are described by other rules and equations than those that have half-number spin. Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein predicted in 1924 that at very low temperatures atoms with whole-number spin would be able to concentrate themselves in the lowest energy state and form a Bose-Einstein condensate. In 1995 Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman succeeded in proving the phenomenon in a rarefied gas of rubidium atoms at an extremely low temperature.

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MLA style: Eric A. Cornell – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2018. Fri. 19 Oct 2018. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2001/cornell/facts/>

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