[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 136 (Thursday, October 11, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Page S10636]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS FOR PHYSICS

  Mr. ALLARD. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to recognize the 
accomplishments of two Boulder, Colorado scientists. On October 10, 
2001 Carl E. Wieman, a professor of physics at the University of 
Colorado at Boulder and Eric A. Cornell, the senior scientist at the 
National Institute of Standards and Technology, (NIST), received the 
Nobel Prize for Physics. The two shared the award with Wolfgang 
Ketterle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  All three received this award for their work that created the world's 
first Bose-Einstein Condensate which occurs when a group of atoms 
overlap and their individual wavelengths behave in identical fashion 
creating a ``superatom''. The condensate allows scientists to study the 
extremely small world of quantum physics as if they are looking through 
a giant magnifying glass. Its creation established a new branch of 
atomic physics that has provided a number of scientific discoveries.
  The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, NIST, the 
Office of Naval Research and the University of Colorado at Boulder. 
Weiman and Cornell are both fellows of JILA which is formerly known as 
the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics where much of the 
research was done. It is a joint institute of the University of 
Colorado at Boulder and NIST and it exists for research and graduate 
education in the physical sciences.
  Both Wieman and Cornell have won several prestigious awards in the 
past including the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics from the Franklin 
Institute in 2000, the Lorentz Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy 
of Arts and Sciences in 1998, the King Faisal International Prize in 
Science in 1997 and the Fritz London Award for low-temperature physics 
in 1996.
  Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell became the second and third Nobel Prize 
winners at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Cornell is the 
second for NIST. Thomas Cech, a CU-Boulder professor of Chemistry and 
biochemistry, was a co winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with 
Sydney Altman of Yale University for research on RNA. William Phillips, 
A NIST fellow, shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics.
  I want to personally congratulate Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell for 
this truly prestigious award of excellence in scientific research.

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