by GILBERT WONG
When it comes to science there is no greater prize than the Nobel. Bill Phillips is one of the select band of laureates, winning for physics in 1997.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences makes no concessions to the inconvenience of time zones. Its members meet, decide the winners, then call them immediately.
The phone rang at 3 am in Phillips' hotel room in Los Angeles, where he was attending a conference. All he recalls is a Swedish accent.
"I was half asleep. I think my response might have been, 'Doh!' It was unreal," he says.
One day he was Joe Scientist, the next a Reuters photographer was walking backwards in front of him, flashgun firing.
"This was the sort of thing that supermodels deal with. I wasn't a supermodel."
True. It would not be unkind to describe Phillips, with his bushy beard, thickish specs and short-sleeved white shirt, as having walked out of a Larson cartoon.
Nor would he object. Phillips has a genial self-knowledge and does not take himself too seriously. He is that rarity: a true man of science, but one who in a visit to Auckland in February was able to explain complex concepts in a way that captured the attention of non-scientists.
Phillips, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, won the Nobel, along with fellow-American Stephen Chu and French scientist Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, for techniques and theories they developed to trap and cool atoms using laser light.
He came to Auckland to talk with university physicists working in the same area of quantum physics.
But why do Phillips and perhaps 100 or more teams of physicists at the world's top institutions want to cool atoms? The better to see what they're up to, Phillips explains. And his work relates directly to what Auckland physicist Scott Parkins and others have achieved in charting the motions of atoms. (See main story.)
As you read this, air molecules are whizzing by at speeds of up to 4000 km/h. "If you want to see what they're doing, there's no hope - boom, they're gone before you know it," he says.
Freezing gases doesn't work as it only transforms their state: the molecules end up too close together, and even if they're chilled to minus 270 deg C (three degrees above absolute zero, which is as cold as it gets), gas atoms are still moving at about 400 km/h.
The answer, says Phillips, is to cool atoms without freezing them. At a temperature of one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero, free hydrogen atoms, for example, finally slow to a crawl of about 1 km/h and become easier to locate.
But how to do that without freezing them? The solution was "optical molasses." At the quantum or subatomic level, particles act like waves and vice versa. And while photons, the elementary particles of light, have no mass, they do have momentum.
The trick Phillips, Chu and Cohen-Tannoudji have mastered is to trap atoms in laser beams whose frequency matches the atoms. The atoms behave as if caught in a viscous fluid as photons from lasers hit and slow the atoms. The effect has been dubbed "optical molasses."
Chu's first device shot six laser beams at sodium atoms. Phillips' contribution was the so-called Zeeman slower, a magnetic "bottle" that trapped the cooled atoms.
Their achievement needs to be measured against a real-world figure. The slowing by optical cooling can be compared to tossing a tennis ball upwards against a force of gravity 100,000 times stronger than Earth's. Even at 4000 km/h an object would slow quickly in such a gravitational field.
Phillips presents good evidence that the Nobel does not necessarily change your life. Admittedly, he says, grants are easier to obtain. And there was the prizemoney, one million Swedish kronor. Translated into American dollars, and after splitting it with the two other winners, Phillips ended up with about $US300,000 ($150,000) on which he had to pay tax.
"I'm not complaining. It's great, but the net effect on my personal life is that after my daughters finish college I may not be a poor man."
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