Carl Edwin Wieman
Wieman, Carl Edwin (1851-), an American physicist, helped discover a new state of matter, called the Bose-Einstein condensate. For this discovery, Wieman shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics with American physicist Eric Allin Cornell and German physicist Wolfgang Ketterle.
Since the 1920's, scientists had been seeking a state of matter predicted by physicists Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein, who theorized that if atoms were cooled to a very low temperature all the atoms would act in unison and condense into a single super atom. This process, similar to that of condensation, became known as the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).
In the mid-1990's, Wieman and Cornell were working at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (now known by its acronym JILA), a research institute in Boulder, Colorado, operated jointly by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado. The two were investigating the structure of matter using ultra-low temperatures. In June of 1995, Wieman and Cornell cooled rubidium atoms to nearly absolute zero and, in the process, produced an extreme state of matter consistent with Bose and Einstein's descriptions. Wieman and Cornell's work has a number of applications and BEC may lead to revolutionary developments in precision measurements and nanotechnology.
Wieman received a B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973. After earning a Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1977, he accepted a position as assistant research scientist in the department of physics at the University of Michigan. In 1979, he was named assistant professor of physics, a position he held until 1984. He then left Michigan to join the faculty at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, where he became professor of physics in 1987 and 10 years later, distinguished professor. In 1985, he became a fellow at JILA, and from 1993 to 1995, he served as chairman.