Carl Edwin Wieman
active c. 1951, Corvallis, Oregon, United States
American physicist who co-created the first Bose–Einstein condensate in 1995; later a leading evidence-based science-education reformer.
Wieman earned his bachelor's at MIT and his PhD at Stanford in 1977, then joined the University of Colorado Boulder and JILA. He became a leading expert in laser cooling and trapping of atoms.
With Eric Cornell, his group produced the first Bose–Einstein condensate in June 1995. From 2007 he shifted toward science education, founding and directing teaching-reform programs at the University of British Columbia and Stanford, and developing the well-known PhET interactive simulations.
Nobel-winning work
After years of refinement, Wieman and Cornell's JILA group went beyond pure laser cooling with the TOP magnetic trap and evaporative cooling — 'let the hottest atoms escape, the rest get colder'. On June 5, 1995 they watched some 2,000 Rb-87 atoms simultaneously occupy the lowest-energy quantum state.
It was the first laboratory realization of Bose–Einstein condensation — predicted for atomic gases in 1924–1925: a macroscopic 'super-atom' in which every particle shares the same wavefunction. Together with Wolfgang Ketterle (sodium condensates and condensate interference), the three received the 2001 Nobel 'for the achievement of Bose–Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates'.
Workplaces: University of Colorado Boulder, Stanford University
United States