Ketterle, Wolfgang

For achieving a Bose-Einstein condensate in dilute gases of alkali atoms, Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman ivere awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics. Sharing the prize with Cornell and Wieman was Wolfgang Ketterle for his fundamental studies of condensates. 

Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, Carl E. Wieman 1948 Patrick M.S. Blackett... 

Evaporative Cooling of Trapped Atoms, Wolfgang Ketterle and N. J. Van Druten Nonclassical States of Motion in Ion Traps,... 

The development of techniques for cooling and trapping of atoms has led to great advances in physics, which have already been recognized by two Nobel prizes. In 1997 the prize was jointly awarded to Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William D. Phillips for their developments of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light [1-3]. In 2001, Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, and Carl E. Wieman jointly received the Nobel prize for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates [4,5]. 

This was carried out by Eric A. Cornell, Carl E. Wieman, and Wolfgang Ketterle (who received the Nobel Prize in 2001 for discovering a new state of matter ). In the Bose condensate, the bosons (alkali metal atoms) are in the same place in a peculiar sense. The total wave function for the bosons was, to a first approximation, aprodnct of identical nodeless wave functions for the particular bosons (this ensures proper symmetry). Each of the wave functions extends considerably in space (the Bose condensate is as large as a fraction of a millimetre), bnt all have been centered in the same point in space. 

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