Wolfgang Ketterle
Ketterle, Wolfgang (1957-) helped discover a new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). For this discovery, he shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics with American physicists Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Edwin Wieman.
Ketterle was born Oct. 21, 1957, in Heidelberg, Germany. He studied physics at the University of Heidelberg. He received his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1986 from Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich and was a staff scientist at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany. In 1990, Ketterle became a research associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts. Three years later, he became assistant professor of physics. In 1997, he became a full professor.
The work of Ketterle, Cornell, and Wieman was based on that of Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. In 1924, Bose made calculations regarding light particles and sent his results to physicist Albert Einstein, who extended the theory. The system of statistical quantum mechanics developed by Bose and Einstein became known as Bose-Einstein statistics. This system applies to particles named bosons after Bose.
Einstein predicted that if a gas of certain atoms was to be cooled to a very low temperature, all the atoms would suddenly gather in the lowest possible energy state. Matter waves of the individual atoms would then merge into a single wave. Thousands of atoms would behave like one big superatom, just as drops of liquid collect in condensation. This idea is called the Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEG.
To achieve Bose-Einstein condensation, scientists would have to develop technology to supercool atoms to less than one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero, the theoretical temperature at which the atoms of a substance have the least possible energy. Ketterle and his team at MIT competed with Cornell and Wieman's team in their laboratory at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) to achieve this. Cornell and Wieman's team first created BEC in a dilute gas of ribidium atoms on June 5, 1995. On Sept. 20, 1995, Ketterle formed BEC by using sodium atoms.