Nobel Laureate scientist William Phillips will deliver a lecture titled “Almost Absolute Zero: The Story of Laser Cooling and Trapping” at 6 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 25 in McCrary Theatre, located on the Elon campus. His lecture, which is free and open to the public, is part of the Voices of Discovery Science Speaker Series, sponsored by the departments of Science and Mathematics.
Phillips’ research concentrates on the use of a focused beam of atoms to create small electronic components. He was part of the team that received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.
The team’s research involved the use of opposing beams of high energy laser light to cool gases to nearly absolute zero, then trapping the atoms within magnetic fields to allow the study of their inner structures.
Phillips and his colleagues have been able to successfully slow the speed of atoms from 4,000 kilometers per hour to less than one kilometer per hour. These cold, slow moving atoms are being used for applications ranging from highly accurate atomic clocks to new quantum devices such as atom lasers.
Phillips is a research scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. Phillips was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 and received the Gold Medal award from the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1993.
-30-