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AWARDS

2001 Nobel Prize in Physics - Eric Cornell

Nobel Prize

Eric A. Cornell of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Carl E. Wieman of the University of Colorado at Boulder were awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics. They shared the prize with Wolfgang Ketterle, a German citizen residing in the United States and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

Winner's Name

Eric Cornell

Awarded

October 9, 2001

Awarding Organization

Nobel Foundation

Cornell and University of Colorado physicist Carl Wieman did the groundbreaking experiment at JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder. In June 1995, after five years of focused effort, Cornell and Wieman’s group created the world’s first Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a new form of matter in which ultracold atoms coalesce into a single “superatom” with uniform properties. In papers that were published in 1924 and 1925, Albert Einstein predicted that BEC could exist, building on the work of Indian physicist Saytendra Nath Bose. It would be another 70 years until experimental physicists actually created the BEC in the lab.

Cornell shared the prize with Wieman and with Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Wolfgang Ketterle, who also performed seminal work in BECs starting later in 1995.

NIST and the Nobel segment on Eric Cornell >>

Physics