Nobel Prize Winner in Physics, William Daniel Phillips, Arrives in Vilnius University

Professor William Daniel Phillips, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics and a Distinguished Researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States of America (USA), will be in Vilnius from 2 to 5 October. The world-renowned physicist is coming to Vilnius University, where he will meet with the rector, Prof. Rimvydas Petrauskas, students of the Faculty of Physics, and on October 4. 6:00 p.m. will give a public lecture titled “Time, Einstein and the Coolest Stuff in the Universe”.

W. D. Phillips studies light-atom interactions and single atoms as qubits for quantum information processing. In 1988, he cooled the atoms to a temperature six times lower than the theoretical limit that was previously set. The professor has developed methods for cooling and accumulating atoms with laser beams and has developed a method for capturing atoms at low temperatures. In recognition of this work, W. D. Phillips and his colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Steven Chu were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997.

The aforementioned advances later led to the creation of the first Bose-Einstein condensate, a new exotic state of matter, which had been predicted some 70 years earlier by Albert Einstein and the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. Very low temperatures help form a giant (collective) wave of atoms, called the Bose-Einstein condensate, where all the atoms are in the same quantum state. The atoms in this state are so chilled and slow that, in effect, they merge and behave as one single quantum entity that is much larger than any individual atom. Cold atom research is important for rapidly-evolving quantum informatics, highly accurate measurements, and many other fields.

William Daniel Phillips is a US Physicist, Nobel Prize winner, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a US National Academy of Sciences (NIST) Fellow.

The professor completed his doctoral and postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1978, he joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology where he conducted award-winning research.