November 2001 - Nr. 11
German Physicist to Receive Nobel Prize
TWIG - A scientist from Heidelberg is to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics this year. Wolfgang Ketterle, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will share the prize with two American colleagues, Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman of the University of Colorado, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday, October 9. The scientists were selected for producing and investigating a state of matter known as Bose-Einstein condensation, in which the atoms of a given substance oscillate together like the light particles of a laser beam. The potential for such a state was first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1924, based on theoretical calculations completed by the Indian physicist S. N. Bose. Born in 1957, Ketterle completed his PhD at the University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching (Bavaria).
