Work on Atom Trapping and Cooling Gets a Warm Reception in Stockholm

DEC 01, 1997

An atom at room temperature zips around at thousands of kilometers per hour. A hit by a single photon barely fazes it. Yet somehow, researchers have harnessed radiation forces to slow atoms to a few centimeters per second and trap them in place. For that feat, this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881626

Barbara Goss Levi

This month, Steven Chu, Claude Cohen‐Tannoudji and William Phillips will doff their laboratory clothes and don white tie and tails to receive the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics in Stockholm. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences selected these three “for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.” Thanks to these methods, neutral atoms have now been slowed to speeds below a few centimeters per second, corresponding, for helium atoms, totemperatures of a few hundred nanokelvin. To bring atoms to such a crawl, the researchers broke not one but two barriers originally thought to limit the temperatures to which atoms could be cooled.

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