Contact: Collier Smith, smithcn@boulder.nist.gov
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NIST 97-14
April 21, 1997
Contacts: Collier Smith CORNELL WINS
(303) 497-3198 NSF AWARD
collier.smith@nist.gov
Peter Caughey
(303) 492-4007
peter.caughey@Colorado.EDU
The National Science Foundation has announced that Eric A. Cornell, a
physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is the
1997 winner of the Alan T. Waterman Award. Cornell is also an adjoint
professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The Waterman Award recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any
field of science or engineering supported by the National Science
Foundation. In addition to a medal, the awardee receives a grant of
$500,000 over a three-year period for scientific research or advanced
study in the mathematical, physical, medical, biological, engineering,
social or other sciences at the institution of the recipient's choice.
The award will be presented in ceremonies in Washington, D.C., on May 7.
Cornell, of Boulder, Colo., was recognized "for his leading role in the
creation of Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas and for innovations in
the manipulation, trapping and cooling of atoms that led to the
realization of this new state of matter."
Bose-Einstein condensation was first created in the summer of 1995 in
Cornell's lab at JILA, a joint program of the University of Colorado and
NIST. The work was accomplished with CU professor Carl Wieman,
postdoctoral researcher Michael Anderson and graduate students Jason
Ensher and Michael Matthews.
The Bose-Einstein condensate, a new form of matter predicted by Albert
Einstein and Satyendra Bose more than 70 years ago is expected to shed
new light on the strange realm of quantum mechanics. It occurs when
individual atoms meld into a "superatom" at about 170 billionths of a
degree above absolute zero and was created by cooling rubidium atoms in
a two-step process using laser and magnetic traps.
This epochal research also has been recognized by a series of other
significant awards from around the world over the past two years,
including the King Faisal International Prize in Science ($200,000), the
AAAS-Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the Carl Zeiss Award, the Fritz London
Prize in Low Temperature Physics, the American Physical Society's I. I.
Rabi Award in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, the Presidential
Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, and NIST's Samuel W.
Stratton Award.
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