Eric Allin Cornell (born December 19, 1961) is an American physicist who, along with Carl E. Wieman, was able to synthesize the first

Bose–Einstein condensate In condensed matter physics, a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter that is typically formed when a gas of bosons at very low densities is cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero (−273.15 °C or −459.67&n ...

in 1995. For their efforts, Cornell, Wieman, and

Wolfgang Ketterle Wolfgang Ketterle (; born 21 October 1957) is a German physicist and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research has focused on experiments that trap and cool atoms to temperatures close to absolute zer ...

shared the

Nobel Prize in Physics ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...

in 2001.

Biography

Cornell was born in

Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

, where his parents were completing graduate degrees at nearby Stanford University. Two years later he moved to

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Greater Boston, Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most ...

, where his father was a professor of

civil engineering Civil engineering is a professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including public works such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, airports, sewa ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. Here he grew up with his younger brother and sister, with yearlong intermezzos in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...

, and Lisbon,

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, In recognized minority languages of Portugal: :* mwl, República Pertuesa is a country located on the Iberian Peninsula, in Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Macaronesian ...

, where his father spent sabbatical years. In Cambridge he attended

Cambridge Rindge and Latin School The Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, also known as CRLS or "Rindge," is a public high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It is a part of the Cambridge Public School District. In 1977, two separate schools, the Rindge Technical ...

. The year before his graduation he moved back to California with his mother and finished high school at

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

's Lowell High School, a local

magnet school In education in the United States, the U.S. education system, magnet schools are State school, public schools with Specialized school, specialized Course (education), courses or Curriculum, curricula. "Magnet" refers to how the schools draw stude ...

for academically talented students. After high school he enrolled at Stanford University, where he was to meet his future wife, Celeste Landry. As an undergraduate he earned money as an assistant in the various

low-temperature physics In physics, cryogenics is the production and behaviour of materials at very low temperatures. The 13th IIR International Congress of Refrigeration (held in Washington DC in 1971) endorsed a universal definition of “cryogenics” and “cr ...

groups on campus. He was doing well both in his courses and his jobs in the labs and seemed set for a career in physics. He however doubted whether he wished to pursue such a career, or rather a different one in literature or politics. Halfway through his undergraduate years he went to China and

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northe ...

for nine months to volunteer teaching conversational English and to study

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of v ...

. He learned that this was not where his talents lay, and returned to Stanford with renewed resolve to pursue his true talent – physics. He graduated with honors and distinction in 1985. For graduate school he returned to MIT. There he joined David Pritchard's group, which had a running experiment that tried to measure the mass of the

electron neutrino The electron neutrino () is an elementary particle which has zero electric charge and a spin of . Together with the electron, it forms the first generation of leptons, hence the name electron neutrino. It was first hypothesized by Wolfgang Paul ...

from the

beta decay In nuclear physics, beta decay (β-decay) is a type of radioactive decay in which a beta particle (fast energetic electron or positron) is emitted from an atomic nucleus, transforming the original nuclide to an isobar of that nuclide. For e ...

tritium Tritium ( or , ) or hydrogen-3 (symbol T or H) is a rare and radioactive isotope of hydrogen with half-life about 12 years. The nucleus of tritium (t, sometimes called a ''triton'') contains one proton and two neutrons, whereas the nucleus ...

. Although he was unable to determine the

mass of the neutrino A neutrino ( ; denoted by the Greek letter ) is a fermion (an elementary particle with spin of ) that interacts only via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass is ...

, Cornell did obtain his PhD in 1990. After obtaining his doctorate he joined

Carl Wieman Carl Edwin Wieman (born March 26, 1951) is an American physicist and educationist at Stanford University, and currently the A.D White Professor at Large at Cornell University. In 1995, while at the University of Colorado Boulder, he and Eric A ...

at the

University of Colorado Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado s ...

as a postdoctoral researcher on a small

laser cooling Laser cooling includes a number of techniques in which atoms, molecules, and small mechanical systems are cooled, often approaching temperatures near absolute zero. Laser cooling techniques rely on the fact that when an object (usually an atom) ...

experiment. During his two years as a postdoc he came up with a plan to combine

and

evaporative cooling An evaporative cooler (also known as evaporative air conditioner, swamp cooler, swamp box, desert cooler and wet air cooler) is a device that cools air through the evaporation of water. Evaporative cooling differs from other air conditioning s ...

in a magnetic trap to create a

(BEC). Based on his proposal he was offered a permanent position at

JILA JILA, formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, is a physical science research institute in the United States. JILA is located on the University of Colorado Boulder campus. JILA was founded in 1962 as a joint institute ...

NIST The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sc ...

in Boulder. In 1995 Cornell and Wieman gave the University of Colorado's George Gamow Memorial Lecture. For synthesizing the first Bose–Einstein condensate in 1995, Cornell, Wieman, and

shared the

in 2001. In 1997,

Deborah S. Jin Deborah Shiu-lan Jin (; November 15, 1968 – September 15, 2016) was an American physicist and fellow with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); Professor Adjunct, Department of Physics at the University of Colorado; and ...

joined Cornell's group at JILA, where she led the team that produced the

fermionic condensate A fermionic condensate or Fermi–Dirac condensate is a superfluid phase formed by fermionic particles at low temperatures. It is closely related to the Bose–Einstein condensate, a superfluid phase formed by bosonic atoms under similar condi ...

in 2003. He is currently a professor at the

and a physicist at the

United States Department of Commerce The United States Department of Commerce is an executive department of the U.S. federal government concerned with creating the conditions for economic growth and opportunity. Among its tasks are gathering economic and demographic data for busi ...

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into Outline of p ...

. His lab is located at

. He was awarded the

Lorentz Medal Lorentz Medal is a distinction awarded every four years by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was established in 1925 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the doctorate of Hendrik Lorentz. The medal is given for impor ...

in 1998 and is a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsi ...

. He was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, ...

in 2005.

Awards and honors

Cornell received multiple awards including the

in 2001. * Ioannes Marcus Marci Medal for Molecular Spectroscopy, Ioannes Marcus Marci Spectroscopic Society, Czech Republic, 2012 * Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2005 * Nobel Prize in Physics 2001 * Member, National Academy of Sciences, 2000 * Fellow, Optical Society of America, Elected 2000 * R. W. Wood Prize, Optical Society of America, 1999 * Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, 1999 * Lorentz Medal, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998 * Fellow, The American Physical Society, Elected 1997 * I. I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, American Physical Society, 1997 * King Faisal International Prize in Science, 1997 * National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award, 1997 * Carl Zeiss Award, Ernst Abbe Fund, 1996 * Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics, 1996 * Department of Commerce Gold Medal, 1996 * Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, 1996 * Newcomb-Cleveland Prize, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1995–96 * George Gamow Memorial Lecture, 1995 *

Samuel Wesley Stratton Award The Samuel Wesley Stratton Award has been annually presented by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, then NBS) since 1962 for "an unusually significant research contribution to science or engineering that merits the acclaim of ...

, National Institute of Science and Technology, 1995

Personal life

Cornell married Celeste Laundry in 1995 mere months before the BEC experiment succeeded. Their first daughter was born in 1996, and their second daughter in 1998. In October 2004, his left arm and shoulder were amputated in an attempt to stop the spread of

necrotizing fasciitis Necrotizing fasciitis (NF), also known as flesh-eating disease, is a bacterial infection that results in the death of parts of the body's soft tissue. It is a severe disease of sudden onset that spreads rapidly. Symptoms usually include red or p ...

. He was discharged from the hospital in mid-December, having recovered from the infection, and returned to work part-time in April 2005. Cornell has run in the

Bolder Boulder The Bolder Boulder (styled as BOLDERBoulder and previously BolderBOULDER) is an annual 10-kilometer run in Boulder, Colorado. The most recent race featured over 54,000 runners, walkers, and wheelchair racers, making it the second largest 10k ra ...

several times since moving to Boulder in 1990, most recently in 2022.

References

Bibliography

External links

Cornell Group webpage
at the

University of Colorado The University of Colorado (CU) is a system of public universities in Colorado. It consists of four institutions: University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, University of Colorado Denver, and the University o ...

Bose–Einstein Condensate website
at the