Wolfgang Ketterle

Wolfgang Ketterle, born October 21, 1957 in Heidelberg, Germany, a German physicist and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has focused his research on experiments that trap and cool atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, together with Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman "for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates".

Ketterle achieved his mater's degree at the Technical University of Munich in 1982 and later earned his Ph.D in experimental molecular spectroscopy under the supervision of Herbert Walther and Halmut Figger at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching. He later conducted his postdoctoral research at Garching and the University of Heidelberg.

In 1990, Ketterle began working at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). He was appointed to the MIT physics faculty in 1993. Since 1998, he has served as the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics.

Some of his work has included his MIT group's achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases (in 1995). In 1997, his group was able to demonstrate interference between two colliding condensates, as well as the first realization of an "atom laser", the atomic analogue of an optical laser. More recently, Ketterle has been able to create a molecular Bose condensate (in 2003) and conduct an experiment "providing evidence for 'high-temperature' superfluidity in a fermionic condensate".

Nobel prize biography:
http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/2001/ketterle-autobio.html

Related Links:
Ketterle Group Homepage
MIT - Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms

News
"MIT researchers create a continuous source of coherent atoms"
(MIT News Office, May 16, 2002)