2001 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 9 October 2001.

The citation

The citation reads: "for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates". They share the prize equally.

The laureates

Eric Cornell was born in 1961 in Palo Alto, the United States, and is affiliated with the University of Colorado, JILA, Boulder. Wolfgang Ketterle was born in 1957 in Heidelberg, West Germany (now Germany), and is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. Carl Wieman was born in 1951 in Corvallis, the United States, and is affiliated with the University of Colorado, JILA, Boulder.

Why it matters

Bose-Einstein condensation, predicted by Einstein in the 1920s, is a state of matter in which atoms cooled to near absolute zero behave as a single quantum object. The three physicists first created it in the laboratory in 1995.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.