Cornell, Eric A (1961– )

US physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001, shared with German physicist Wolfgang Ketterle and US physicist Carl E Wieman, for his study of Bose-Einstein condensation and his production of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a dilute gas of alkali-metal atoms.

Cornell and Wieman led the team of scientists at the University of Colorado that in 1995 were the first to create and observe the extreme state of matter predicted by Indian physicist Satyendra Bose and German-born US physicist Albert Einstein in 1924. This state of matter consisted of a collection of atoms that had spontaneously dropped into their lowest possible quantum energy state, similar to a drop of liquid condensing from a gas, and known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. This state is only possible at temperatures close to absolute zero, and Cornell and his associates had to cool a dilute gas of 2,000 rubidium atoms to within 0.0000002 K of absolute zero. This achievement provided a mechanism for the study of fundamental quantum-mechanical systems and could provide new approaches useful in the development of holography and nanotechnology.

Cornell was born in Palo Alto, California. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990. He was made assistant professor adjoint at the physics department of the University of Colorado in 1992 and became full professor adjoint there in 1995. He was appointed senior scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Colorado, in 1992. Cornell was elected as a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2000.