Laureate Biography
Eric Allin Cornell shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics with Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl E Wieman for creating a new and strange form of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Their achievements verified predictions made in the mid-1920s by Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose, who proposed that if a group of atoms are made cold enough, they will slow down to such an extent that they can exist in the same quantum state, and act as though they are a single particle.
Cornell was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961 to parents who were studying for their graduate degrees at Stanford University.
After completing their degrees, the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city Cornell still considers to be his hometown. Cornell’s mother was a high school English teacher, his father a professor of civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
As a child, Cornell spent most of his time reading. Even at school, Cornell feigned attention at lessons while he read his latest book through his slightly opened desk. He spent so much time engrossed in books during the day that rather than telling him bedtime stories his father gave him problems to think about to help him sleep. Although these seldom achieved their goal, he recalls, they were often classic physics problems. Another favourite childhood pastime was building model rockets, in particular designing his own, and then tweaking and altering them to improve their flight. Seeking perfection, speed and height were less important to Cornell than making sure his rockets did not wobble during their flight.
In high school, Cornell joined the maths and chess clubs and he learned to write computer programmes. Before his final year, he and his siblings moved with their mother to San Francisco, after which he became an undergraduate at Stanford University. It was there that he first met his future wife Celeste Landry, though they went their seperate ways for years before they rekindled their old romance and married in January 1995.
While at Stanford, Cornell worked afternoons and summers for research groups studying low-temperature physics, and it was this that made him pursue a career in scientific research. He began his graduate degree at MIT in 1985, and upon completion he began his postdoctoral research in 1990 at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at Boulder, Colorado, where he used lasers to cool atoms.
After the two-year appointment came to a close, Cornell was certain that he knew how to make the unusual state of matter predicted by Bose and Einstein. He stayed at JILA, and it was there with Carl Wieman in 1995 that Cornell successfully synthesized the first Bose-Einstein condensate, using a combination of laser and magnetic techniques to slow, trap and cool around 2,000 rubidium atoms.
In October 2004, Cornell became seriously ill with necrotizing fasciitis, commonly known as flesh-eating disease, which causes the destruction of skin and muscle. As a result, his left arm and shoulder had to be amputated, something he refers to as “more an inconvenience than a catastrophe”. Cornell returned to JILA in 2005, where he remains today. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Nobel Prize in Physics 2001
Eric Cornell’s Nobel Lecture
Eric Cornell’s group web site
Wikipedia:Eric Cornell
