SEAC and the Start of Image Processing at the National Bureau of Standards

William D. Phillips

Dr. William D. Phillips was born in 1948 in Wilkes-Barre PA, and attended public schools in Pennsylvania. He received a B.S. in Physics from Juniata College in 1970 and the Ph.D. from MIT in 1976. After two years as a Chaim Weizmann postdoctoral fellow at MIT, he joined the staff of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1978. He is currently a NIST Fellow, leader of the Laser Cooling and Trapping Group in the Atomic Physics Division of NIST's Physics Laboratory, and is an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Dr. Phillip's research group has been responsible for developing some of the main techniques now used for laser cooling experiments in laboratories around the world, including the deceleration of atomic beams and magnetic trapping of atoms. In 1988, the NIST group discovered that laser cooling could reach temperatures much lower than had been predicted by theory, a result that led to a new understanding of laser cooling and new opportunities for research, including the achievement of temperatures within a millionth of a degree of Absolute Zero. Today, the group pursues research in collisions of laser cooled atoms, motion of atoms in optical lattices, atom optics, laser cooled atomic clocks, Bose-Einstein condensation, ultra-cold plasmas, and optical tweezers for biomedical applications.

Dr. Phillips is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of the Gold Medal of the U.S. Department of Commerce (1993), the Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute (1996) and the Schawlow Prize of the American Physical Society (1998). In 1997, Dr Phillips shared the Nobel Prize in Physics "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light."

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