William D. Phillips, a 1997 Nobel laureate in physics and a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will deliver the seventh annual Richard C. Lord Lecture at MIT on "Atomic and Molecular Physics with Laser-Cooled Atoms" on Tuesday, April 14 from noon-1pm in the Grier Room (34-401). The public is invited to his talk, which is part of the Modern Optics and Spectroscopy series.
Dr. Phillips received the PhD from MIT in 1976. After two years as a Chaim Weizmann postdoctoral fellow at MIT, he joined the staff of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (then the National Bureau of Standards).
At NIST, he began studies of laser cooling of neutral atoms, which led to his creation and leadership of the Laser Cooling and Trapping Group of NIST's Physics Laboratory. Members pursue research in collisions of laser cooled atoms, motion of atoms in optical lattices, atom optics, laser cooled atomic clocks, Bose-Einstein condensation, ultra-cold plasmas and optical tweezers.
Dr. Phillips shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics with Stephan Chu of Stanford University and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji of the ������������������cole Normale Sup���rieure in Paris "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light."
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 8, 1998.
