Wolfgang Ketterle
Creating new states of matter at ultracold temperatures
Wolfgang Ketterle is a German physicist whose experiments have created and explored forms of matter that appear only at temperatures extremely close to absolute zero. At such low temperatures, atoms lose much of their ordinary individual behaviour and begin to act collectively according to the laws of quantum mechanics.
Ketterle is best known for his work on Bose-Einstein condensation, a state of matter predicted in the 1920s but not observed in a dilute atomic gas until 1995. In a condensate, a large number of atoms occupy the same quantum state and behave like a single coherent wave. This makes it possible to study quantum phenomena on a scale that can be controlled directly in the laboratory.
His group also achieved the first realisation of an atom laser in 1997, producing a coherent beam of atoms in a way analogous to the coherent beam of light produced by an optical laser. His research continues to investigate superfluidity, coherence, correlations and strongly interacting many-body systems, providing new ways to test fundamental theories and simulate complex quantum materials.
Career and recognitions
Ketterle received his diploma from the Technical University of Munich in 1982 and completed his PhD in Physics at the University of Munich in 1986. He carried out postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and the University of Heidelberg before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990. He joined the MIT faculty in 1993 and has been the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics since 1998.
He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics with Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation and early fundamental studies of condensates. His other honours include the Rabi Prize, the Gustav Hertz Prize, the Fritz London Memorial Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the MIT Killian Award and a Humboldt Research Award. He is a member of several academies of sciences and has received a number of honorary degrees.