Eric Allin Cornell
Eric Allin Cornell ( born December 19, 1961 in Palo Alto, California) is an American physicist and Nobel laureate.
Life
Eric Cornell was born on 19 December 1961 as the oldest of three children of a professor of civil engineering at MIT and an English teacher at the high school. He studied physics at Stanford University and went to his graduation in 1985 at MIT in Cambridge, the city where he had lived since the age of two. He worked in the laboratory of David E. Pritchard on the mass determination of 3He and 3H and received his doctorate in 1990. Remarkably, came to Cornell's departure from MIT Wolfgang Ketterle in the working group Pritchard, who was with Cornell received the Nobel Prize.
Cornell applied for a postdoctoral position at David Wineland at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST ), but not awarded the contract. Instead, he was taught by Sarah Gilbert, who had overheard his interview to her husband Carl E. Wieman, who was at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics ( JILA ) in Boulder busy. He stayed even after his two years as a postdoctoral assistant professor at JILA and in 1995 was appointed professor, since 1994 he is also a Fellow at NIST.
Eric Cornell married in January 1995 Celeste Landry, he already had ten years earlier met at Stanford, but again lost sight of. He has two daughters, Eliza (* 1996) and Sophia (* 1998).
2004 had his left arm and part of his left shoulder amputated due to necrotizing fasciitis.
Work
He was awarded jointly with Carl E. Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the achievement of Bose -Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates " 2001. After the successful achievement of Bose -Einstein condensates he explored since the physical properties of these systems.