William D. Phillips
| William Daniel Phillips | |
|---|---|
Phillips at the 2012 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting
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| Born |
November 5, 1948 Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions |
NIST University of Maryland, College Park |
| Alma mater |
MIT Juniata College |
| Known for | Laser cooling |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in physics (1997) |
William Daniel Phillips (born November 5, 1948) is an American physicist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1997, with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji.
Phillips was born to William Cornelius Phillips of Juniata, Pennsylvania and Mary Catherine Savino of Ripacandida, Italy. He is of Italian descent on his mother's side and of Welsh descent on his father's side. His parents moved to Camp Hill (near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) in 1959, where he attended high school and graduated valedictorian of his class. He graduated from Juniata College in 1970 summa cum laude. After that he received his physics doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1978 he joined NIST.
In 1996, he received the Albert A. Michelson Medal from The Franklin Institute.
Phillips' doctoral thesis concerned the magnetic moment of the proton in H2O. He later did some work with Bose–Einstein condensates. In 1997 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Steven Chu for his contributions to laser cooling, a technique to slow the movement of gaseous atoms in order to better study them, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and especially for his invention of the Zeeman slower.
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