Wieman, Carl Edwin
Carl Edwin Wieman, 1951–, American physicist, b. Corvallis, Oreg., Ph.D. Stanford, 1977. He was a professor at the Univ. of Colorado from 1984 to 2006. In 2007, he joined the Univ. of British Columbia in Canada as director of the Carl Wieman Science Foundation Initiative. Wieman and Eric Cornell shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics with Wolfgang Ketterle for creating the first Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC; see condensate) in the laboratory and characterizing its properties. Wieman and Cornell produced the first BEC in an ultracold gas of rubidium atoms in 1995 at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colo., a collaborative organization of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Univ. of Colorado. The work of three provided scientists with a new window into the world of quantum physics.