Nobel Prize-winning physicist William D. Phillips delivered this
year's Maurer Lecture to a capacity crowd on March 4 in Giffels Auditorium.
Dr. Robert Maurer and Mrs. Barbara Maurer were in attendance. Dr.
Maurer received the Fulbright College's Distinguished Alumni Award
from the Department of Physics. Bernard Madison, Dean of the Fulbright
College of Arts and Sciences, presented the certificate and inducted
him into the College's Alumni Academy.
In his public talk, Dr. Phillip discussed atomic clocks, the most
accurate timepieces ever made. Accurate clocks are essential for synchronization
of high speed communication, the Global Positioning System that guides
aircraft, boats and backpackers, and other features of modern life.
The limitations of atomic clocks come from the thermal motion of the
atoms. Hot atoms move fast and suffer from time shifts as predicted
by Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Contrary to intuition, things
can be cooled by shining laser light on them. With laser cooling,
gases can be cooled to less than one millionth of a degree above Absolute
Zero. The slow-moving atoms in such a gas allow one to make even more
accurate clocks, perhaps accurate to within a few billionths of a
second per year. Laser cooling also makes possible the recent observation
of Einstein's long-standing prediction of Bose-Einstein condensation,
hailed as one of the most important recent scientific developments.
The following day, Dr. Phillips delivered a Physics Department Colloquium
entitled "Atom optics with Bose condensates." This dealt with the
quantum wave aspects of atoms. Because of the wave nature of atoms,
many of the phenomena familiar in "photon" optics can also be observed
in "atom" optics, including diffraction, Bragg scattering, and interferometery.
With the experimental achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation, scientists
now have coherent atom sources for atom optics analogous to laser
sources for photon optics. He described a number of matter-wave optics
experiments that have been performed by his group using Bose condensates,
including the first demonstration of non-linear atom optics: four-wave
mixing of deBroglie waves.
Phillips joined the staff of the National Institute of Standards
and Technology in 1978. He is leader of the Laser Cooling and Trapping
Group in the Atomic Physics Division of NIST's physics lab, and is
Adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland. He is
a Fellow of the APS, the Optical Society of America, and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy
of Sciences. He received the Department of Commerce's Gold Medal (1993),
the Franklin Institute's Michelson Medal (1996), and the APS Schawlow
Prize (1998). He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics "for development
of methods to cool and trap atoms with lasers."
