Wolfgang Ketterle

Wolfgang Ketterle
Wolfgang Ketterle at a symposium at Brown University, 2007
Born	(1957-10-21) 21 October 1957 (age 59) Heidelberg, West Germany
Nationality	Germany, United States
Fields	Physics
Institutions	University of Heidelberg MIT
Alma mater	Heidelberg TUM LMU Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics
Doctoral advisor	Herbert Walther Hartmut Figger
Known for	Bose–Einstein condensates
Notable awards	Benjamin Franklin Medal (2000) Nobel Prize for Physics (2001)

Wolfgang Ketterle (born 21 October 1957) is a German physicist and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research has focused on experiments that trap and cool atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero, and he led one of the first groups to realize Bose–Einstein condensation in these systems in 1995. For this achievement, as well as early fundamental studies of condensates, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, together with Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Wieman.

Ketterle was born in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, and attended school in Eppelheim and Heidelberg. In 1976 he entered the University of Heidelberg, before transferring to the Technical University of Munich two years later, where he gained the equivalent of his master's diploma in 1982. In 1986 he earned a Ph.D in experimental molecular spectroscopy under the supervision of Herbert Walther and Hartmut Figger at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, before conducting postdoctoral research at Garching and the University of Heidelberg. In 1990 he joined the group of David E. Pritchard in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT (RLE). He was appointed to the MIT physics faculty in 1993 and, since 1998, he has been John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics. In 2006, he was appointed Associate Director of RLE and began serving as director of MIT's Center for Ultracold Atoms.