William Phillips

Born on 5 November 1948 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, William Phillips is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist known for the development of laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms. After earning his PhD in physics from MIT in 1976, he worked two more years at MIT as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1978 Phillips joined the National Bureau of Standards (later NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where he launched his pioneering research into laser cooling. One of its many applications has been to improve measurement capabilities, such as the creation of more accurate atomic clocks. His work on laser cooling earned him a share of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics , along with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. Phillips has gone on to pursue a number of other research topics, including quantum information with single-atom qubits, atomic-gas Bose-Einstein condensates, atoms in optical lattices, atomic physics analogs of condensed-matter systems, coherent de Broglie–wave atom optics, and collisions of ultracold atoms. In 1992 Phillips joined the faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park, and in 2001 was named Distinguished University Professor. Besides the Nobel, Phillips has received many other honors and awards, including the 1996 Albert A. Michelson Medal, 1998 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science, and the 2000 Richtmyer Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has served on a number of committees and boards. (Photo credit: Markus Pössel, CC BY-SA 3.0 )

Date in History: 5 November 1948