William Daniel Phillips

William Daniel Phillips is an American physicist who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

Laser cooling: A family of methods that use light to reduce the motion and temperature of atoms. Phillips developed methods that brought laser-cooled atoms below the Doppler cooling limit.
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji: A French physicist who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for methods of cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. He shared the prize with Phillips and developed complementary explanations of laser cooling.
Atomic clock: A clock that measures time by tracking a stable frequency associated with transitions in atoms. Cooling atoms reduces motion-related frequency shifts in precision timekeeping.
Ultracold atoms: Atoms cooled to temperatures at which their quantum behavior becomes experimentally prominent. Phillips’s cooling methods helped make these systems accessible to laboratory study.
Doppler cooling: A laser-cooling method that slows atoms through the Doppler shift of light scattered from counterpropagating beams. Phillips and colleagues used it as a foundation for experiments that revealed sub-Doppler cooling.
Steven Chu: An American physicist who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for laser cooling and trapping of atoms. Phillips and Chu were honored for closely related experimental advances.
Bose–Einstein condensate: A state of matter in which many bosons occupy the same lowest-energy quantum state at ultralow temperature. Laser cooling and trapping helped create the ultracold conditions needed for its experimental realization.
1997 Nobel Prize in Physics: The Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William D. Phillips for laser cooling and trapping atoms. The award recognized Phillips’s contributions alongside two researchers whose work complemented his own.
Sisyphus cooling: A laser-cooling mechanism in which atoms lose kinetic energy while climbing hills in a light-induced potential landscape. This mechanism explains how Phillips’s group cooled atoms below the Doppler limit.
John L. Hall: An American physicist who shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for precision laser spectroscopy and the optical frequency comb. Hall’s Nobel-winning work used laser precision for measurement rather than cooling and trapping atoms.

Linked from 2 pages