William D. PhillipsBorn 5 Nov 1948.American physicist whose experiments using laser light to cool and trap atoms earned him a share of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 (with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji). They developed methods to use laser light to cool gases to the microkelvin temperature range near absolute zero, and keeping the chilled atoms floating or captured in different kinds of “atom traps”. The laser light functions as a thick liquid, dubbed optical molasses, in which the atoms are slowed down. Individual atoms can be studied there with very great accuracy and their inner structure can be determined. As more and more atoms are captured in the same volume a thin gas forms, and its properties can be studied in detail. |
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