David Jeffrey Wineland
active c. 1944, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, USA
American physicist who pioneered ion trapping and laser cooling — foundations of optical clocks and quantum computing.
Wineland worked at NIST Boulder from 1975, where he and colleagues demonstrated laser cooling of trapped ions (1978) and brought ions to the motional ground state. His group built the first trapped-ion qubit gate (the 1995 CNOT, following the Cirac–Zoller proposal) and ion clocks more accurate than cesium standards.
Nobel-winning work
Wineland's Nobel-recognized work trapped single ions in electromagnetic traps, laser-cooled them to quantum temperatures, controlled both internal states and motion with precise pulses, and prepared/measured quantum states nearly perfectly — a 'window' that makes real the single-quantum-system experiments theorists once only imagined.
Workplaces: NIST, Boulder, University of Colorado Boulder
United States