Wieman, Carl Edwin
Wieman, Carl Edwin,
1951–, American physicist, b. Corvallis, Oreg., Ph.D. Stanford, 1977. He was a professor at the Univ. of Colorado from 1984 to 2006. In 2007, he joined the Univ. of British Columbia in Canada as director of the Carl Wieman Science Foundation Initiative. Wieman and Eric CornellCornell, Eric Allin,1961–, American physicist, b. Palo Alto, Calif., Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990. Since 1990, he has been a researcher at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colo.
..... Click the link for more information. shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics with Wolfgang KetterleKetterle, Wolfgang,
1957–, German physicist, Ph.D. Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany, 1986. He has been a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1990.
..... Click the link for more information. for creating the first Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC; see condensatecondensate,
matter in the form of a gas of atoms, molecules, or elementary particles that have been so chilled that their motion is virtually halted and as a consequence they lose their separate identities and merge into a single entity.
..... Click the link for more information. ) in the laboratory and characterizing its properties. Wieman and Cornell produced the first BEC in an ultracold gas of rubidium atoms in 1995 at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colo., a collaborative organization of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Univ. of Colorado. The work of three provided scientists with a new window into the world of quantum physics.