For Immediate Release: March 2, 2001
Contact: Tom Krattenmaker
610-328-8534
tkratte1@swarthmore.edu
http://www.swarthmore.edu/Home/News
Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Speaks at Swarthmore College
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Willam D. Phillips is renowned for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. On March 20, he will give a lecture, "Almost Absolute Zero," at Swarthmore College at 8 p.m in the Kirby Lecture Hall, Martin 201. The event is free and open to the public.
His talk, an updated version of the Nobel lecture he gave in Stockholm in 1997, is aimed at a general audience and will feature complicated demonstrations involving lasers and liquid nitrogen. The event is sponsored by Swarthmore's chapter of Sigma Xi, a national scientific research society.
A Wilkes-Barre, Pa., native, Phillips has been a fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland since 1996. He joined NIST in 1978 after earning his Ph.D. and completing post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The cooling and trapping of atoms, a discipline that emerged in the mid-1970s with the advent of laboratory lasers, has allowed scientists to observe and measure quantum phenomena in atoms that seem to defy physical principles. Phillips continues to study ultra-cold trapped atoms with spin-off applications for improved accuracy in atomic clocks and in the fabrication of nanostructures. For the latter, Phillips envisions using light to focus an atom laser to create what might be the basis for a next generation of ultra-small structures for electronic circuits.
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