FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE: Jan. 13, 2000 |
Contact: Peter
Caughey, (303) 492-4007 (CU) Fred McGehan, |
The prestigious award also was presented to Wolfgang Ketterle of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. The
three physicists were among 11 laureates announced in Philadelphia
today. Since 1824, the Franklin Institute
has bestowed awards to individuals who have made a significant contribution
to science and technology. Previous laureates include Albert
Einstein, Thomas Alva Edison, Marie
Curie, Edwin Hubbell and Steven Hawking. "We are
proud that our awards program is often a barometer of future Nobel winners," said
Dennis Wint, president and chief executive officer of the Franklin Institute. "The Benjamin Franklin Medals are now one of
the world's most prestigious scientific honors." A total of 91
Franklin laureates hold 93 Nobel prizes, representing 20 percent of the 461 Nobel winners
in physics, chemistry or physiology and medicine. Cornell, Wieman
and Ketterle were cited for experimentally confirming Satyendra Bose's and Albert
Einstein's 1924 prediction that a dilute gas condensate can display properties usually
found only on an atomic or molecular scale. In 1995, Wieman and Cornell created the
world's first Bose-Einstein condensate by cooling atoms to the lowest temperature ever
recorded. The discovery opened up a new field
of research that is now actively pursued around the world. Wieman is a distinguished
professor of physics and has taught at CU-Boulder since 1984.
Cornell is a senior scientist at NIST and an adjoint professor
of physics at CU-Boulder. Both teach undergraduate and graduate
students and both are fellows of JILA,
a joint institute of CU-Boulder and NIST. Wieman has carried out research in laser
spectroscopy of atoms, with an emphasis on laser cooling and trapping and the measurement
of parity violation. The latter work has made
"table-top" measurements of elementary particle physics that are competitive
with the largest particle accelerators. He
currently is studying the properties of Bose-Einstein condensates and developing simpler
and better techniques for cooling and trapping atoms. Cornell's
research interests center around various aspects of laser cooling, including Bose-Einstein
condensation and an experiment on atoms guided by optical forces inside hollow glass
fibers. He also is building an atom-wave
interferometer for ultra-sensitive inertial sensing. The medals will
be presented April 27 at a formal awards ceremony hosted by CBS news anchor Charles Osgood
in Philadelphia. Medals will be bestowed in
five categories: physics, earth sciences, engineering, chemistry, and computer and
cognitive science. The Franklin
Institute is one of the nation's premier centers of science education and development. CU-Boulder was
founded in 1876 and has an enrollment of about 26,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The department of physics is part of the College
of Arts and Sciences. As a
non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce's
Technology Administration, NIST strengthens the U.S.
economy and improves the quality of life by working with industry to develop and apply
technology, measurements and standards. |