Eric Allin Cornell
Cornell, Eric Allin (1961-) helped create a new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). For this achievement, he shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics with German physicist Wolfgang Ketterle and American physicist Carl Edwin Wieman.
Cornell was born in Palo Alto, California. He earned a B.S. degree in physics from Stanford University, Stanford, California, in 1985 and a Ph.D. degree in physics in 1990 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1992, he joined the quantum physics division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, and became a physics professor at the University of Colorado. Cornell soon became a fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA).
The work of Cornell, Ketterle, and Wieman resulted from that of Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose more than 70 years earlier. In 1924, Bose made important theoretical calculations regarding light particles and sent them to physicist Albert Einstein, who extended the theory to include particles of matter.
Einstein predicted that if a gas of certain types of atoms were cooled to a very low temperature, all the atoms would suddenly gather in the lowest possible energy state. Matter waves of thousands of individual atoms would then merge into a single wave and behave like one superatom. They would form a new state of matter, a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).
To achieve BEC, Cornell and Wieman cooled rubidium atoms to less than 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero, the theoretical temperature at which atoms have the least possible energy. After extensive efforts by the Colorado team, Cornell solved the remaining problem that prevented condensation. The condensation was first achieved on June 5, 1995, in a JILA laboratory. Ketterle and his MIT team achieved condensation four months later with sodium atoms.
Cornell was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2000.