NEWARK , November 5, 1999 - Dr. William D. Phillips, recipient of the 1997 Nobel Laureate of Physics with fellow researchers Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, will present "Absolute Zero: The Story of Laser Cooling and Trapping" at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)-Rutgers-Newark Applied Physics Program Fall Colloquium to be held on the NJIT campus, in the Guttenberg Information Technologies Center Room 1400, on Friday, November 12, 1999 at 3:30 pm. Refreshments will be served at 3 pm.

     This lecture will describe methods used by the three researchers to cool atoms within a few millionths of a degree of absolute zero by trapping diffuse clouds of atoms in an "optical molasses" of lasers and magnetic fields. Gas atoms at room temperature normally travel at speeds approaching 4000 km/hour, but cooling slows speeds to under a kilometer an hour, allowing atoms to be studied more readily.

     The technique also formed the basis for the discovery of Bose-Einstein condensation in atomic gases, a bizarre new form of matter imagined by Einstein but only recently observed, and may have other applications, like making tinier electronics, and tools to measure gravitational forces with extreme precision.

     William D. Phillips earned his Ph.D. in physics in 1976 at MIT. After completing post-doctoral re-search also at MIT, he came to NIST (then the National Bureau of Standards) in 1978. A NIST Fellow since 1996, Dr. Phillips is internationally known for advancing basic knowledge and new techniques to chill atoms to extremely low temperatures. Dr. Phillips has received many honors, including the Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the Maryland Academy of Science in 1984, the Gold Medal of the US Department of Commerce in 1993, the Albert A. Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1996 and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. In 1997 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

     For more information, contact Dr. Ken Chin, at 973-596-3297.