David E. Pritchard
David E. Pritchard (* October 15, 1941 in New York City ) is an American physicist. The professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a pioneer of atom optics and atom interferometer.
Life and work
Pritchard studied at Caltech with a bachelor's degree in 1962 and received his doctorate at Harvard University with Daniel Kleppner 1968. From 1968 he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a full professorship of physics in the Research Laboratory for Electronics ( Research Laboratory for Electronics, RLE ) received in 1970. Since 2001 he has been there Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics. 2003 to 2006 he was one of two associate director of RLE under the Director Jeffrey H. Shapiro, succeeding Daniel Kleppner.
In the 1980s, he invented the magnetic trap and the magneto- optical trap for cooling and trapping of atoms. He retired from the field of research in the early 1990s back to Wolfgang Ketterle leave the field, he had taken as a post- doctoral students at MIT and became a professor there. Ketterle developed the atomic cooling and reached 1995 for the first time the Bose -Einstein condensation, a discovery for which, together with Eric Cornell he (the a student of Pritchard was ) and Carl E. Wieman of JILA in Boulder 2001 ( USA) in Physics Nobel Prize.
With atom traps built his research group since the 1980s mass spectrometer (Single Ion Mass Spectrometry ), which hold the world record of accuracy ( 0.1 ppb).
He is a pioneer in the development of atom interferometers. They demonstrated atom interferometer 1991 sodium atoms and microfabricated diffraction gratings. A microfabricated diffraction grating for atoms he developed with staff already in 1988. Again in 1988, he demonstrated Bragg reflection of atoms by a standing light wave. With these works, he was one of the founders of the research field of atom optics.
Pritchard has developed a computer -based system for teaching physics at MIT ( Cyber Tutor ).
He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (1999), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society (APS). In 2003 he received the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser - Physics and 1991, he received the Herbert P. Broida Prize of the APS - 2003 to Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser - Physics and the 2004 Max Born Award.
In 1992, he co-chaired with the psychiatrist John E. Mack at MIT a conference that dealt with the phenomenon of alien abduction, where he gave two lectures on factual evidence and abductions and the terrestrial search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Publications
- Atom Optics. In: Jens C. Zorn & Robert R. Lewis ( ed.): Atomic Physics 12, Twelfth International Conference on Atomic Physics, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1990 American Institute of Physics, 1991, ISBN 0883188112, pp. 165-170.
- Andrea Pritchard, John E. Mack, Pam Kasey & Claudia Yapp (ed.): Alien Discussions. Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference held at MIT, Cambridge, MA. North Cambridge Press, 1995 Alien Discussions / abducted by aliens. Research reports and discussion papers for the conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, on the Abduktionsphänomen. Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt 1996, ISBN 3-86150-174-0