Distinguished Professor Carl E. Wieman of the University of Colorado at Boulder has been named the recipient of the 1999 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science from the American Physical Society.
The prize recognizes outstanding contributions to basic research that uses lasers to advance knowledge of the fundamental properties of materials and their interaction with light. The prize is named for the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who played a major role in developing the laser and its applications and includes a $10,000 award.
The APS cited Wieman, "For pioneering work on the production and study of Bose-Einstein condensation in a dilute atomic vapor, which has become a major testing ground for macroscopic quantum phenomena, and quantum statistical mechanics."
Wieman is a fellow and former chair of JILA, a joint institute of ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The APS is the world's leading organization of physicists and will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 1999. The international group is based in College Park, Md., and has more than 40,000 members in industry, academia and government.
Wieman will receive the award at the APS Centennial Meeting in March 1999 in Atlanta and will give an invited talk at the meeting.
Wieman also has been invited to give the Cherwell-Simon Memorial Lecture for 1999 at the University of Oxford in England. He will join a distinguished group of physicists selected to present the annual lecture including Nobel Prize-winning physicists Leon Lederman and Pierre-Gilles de Gennes.
Wieman was the co-leader of a research team that created a new state of matter in 1995 by cooling atoms to the lowest temperature ever recorded, a scientific advance hailed as the "Holy Grail" of physics. Creation of the first Bose-Einstein condensate was achieved by cooling rubidium atoms to about 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero in a two-step process using lasers and magnetic traps.
The discovery opened up a new field of research that is now actively pursued around the world.
Wieman has taught at ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä-Boulder since 1984 and has developed innovative experiments for undergraduate physics classes, based on his research, that are being duplicated worldwide.
The physics department is part of ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä-Boulder's College of Arts and Sciences. JILA was formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics.