William D. Phillips, whose work in using lasers to "ultracool" and trap atoms won him and two other researchers the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics, visits Bates College to describe that work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 2, in Chase Hall Lounge, Campus Avenue. The lecture is open to the public at no charge.

Phillips is leader of the Laser Cooling and Trapping Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Md. In a lecture titled "Almost Absolute Zero: The Story of Laser Cooling and Trapping," he will tell a Bates audience about research that has revolutionized atomic physics during the past decade.

 In essence, photons in beams of laser light collide with atoms and steal their momentum, which cools them all but totally. Earlier this month, in fact, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers used this process to cool sodium to the lowest temperature ever recorded, only half a billionth of a degree above absolute zero -- that is, minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit, at which temperature atomic motion ceases. Atoms this cold exhibit weird properties that promise many practical uses, such as super-accurate atomic clocks and quantum computers that use individual atoms as working parts.

"Today more than 100 labs around the world are studying atoms, molecules and chemistry at low temperatures with laser-cooling technology," explains Stephen Gensemer, assistant professor of physics at Bates.

 "Dr. Phillips' group continues to lead the way in the development of quantum computers using ultracold atoms," Gensemer says. "They've performed many experiments on clouds of ultracold atoms that continue to give us new insights into the strange world of quantum mechanics."

The son of social workers living in Pennsylvania's hard coal country, Phillips was born in 1948 in Wilkes-Barre. He received his doctorate in physics in 1976 at MIT and did postdoctoral research there as well. He joined the staff of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1978. 

For their pioneering work in using lasers to cool and trap atoms, Phillips received the Nobel in physics jointly with professors Steven Chu of Stanford University and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji of the Collège de France and the École Normal Supérieure, Paris. Also in 1997, Phillips was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He is married and has two children.

His lecture at Bates is sponsored by the Department of Physics and the Office of the Dean of Faculty. For more information, call the college concierge at 207-786-6255.