William Daniel Phillips
William Daniel Phillips ( born November 5, 1948 in Wilkes -Barre, Pennsylvania) is an American physicist. For the cool and trap atoms with laser light (laser cooling), he received together with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen- Tannoudji 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Life and work
Phillips has paternal and maternal Welsh Italian origins. He went to Camp Hill near Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) to school and studied from 1966 with a state scholarship of Pennsylvania at Juniata College in Huntington ( bachelor's degree in physics in 1970 summa cum laude) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ) in Cambridge, where he 1976 doctorate in Daniel Kleppner. Theme of the two-part dissertation were the magnetic moment of the proton in the excited water molecule and inelastic scattering sodium. As a post - graduate student, he was from 1976 to 1978 Chaim Weizmann Fellow at MIT. From 1978 he worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology ( NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. There he developed the laser cooling methods, for which he received the Nobel Prize. He became a Fellow of the NIST 1996. Since 1992 he has been Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland at College Park.
He is one of the pioneers of laser cooling with Steven Chu and Claude Tannoudji. Specifically, he developed the method of Zeeman Slower utilizing the Zeeman effect (1982 to Harold Metcalf ) of neutral atoms in atomic beams, now used for example in the run-up to the magneto- optical traps, in which the atoms are then trapped. Applications of this method in the development of precise atomic clocks, which are used for instance in exact position determinations and in space navigation.
He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (1997), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995), the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society. In 1996 he received the Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1983 and the silver medal in 1993 and the Gold Medal of the Department of Commerce ( Department of Commerce ). In 1970 he was Woodrow Wilson Fellow. In 1987 he received the Samuel Wesley Stratton Award of NIST, 1998 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser - Physics.
He is married to Jane van Wynen since 1970 and has two daughters. As a Methodist, he is also engaged in the dialogue between religion and science. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.