of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology

PAST PRECISION MEASUREMENT GRANT HOLDER WINS NOBEL PRIZE The 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics will be shared by two JILA fellows, Eric Cornell of NIST and Carl Wieman of the University of Colorado, and Wolfgang Ketterle of MIT for their work on Bose-Einstein condensation of atoms. In 1979, Carl Wieman, then at the University of Michigan, was awarded a NIST Precision Measurement Grant. This brings to three the number of people who as young faculty members received one of our grants and went on to be awarded the Nobel Prize. The two others are Daniel Tsui of Princeton University and Steven Chu of Stanford University. An additional Nobel Prize winner, William Phillips of NIST, is closely related to this group. His Ph.D. work was done on an experiment for which his advisor, Daniel Kleppner of MIT, was awarded a NIST Precision Measurement Grant in 1970. As part of its research program since 1970, NIST has awarded Precision Measurement Grants to U.S. universities and colleges so that faculty may conduct significant, primarily experimental research in the field of fundamental measurement or the determination off undamental constants. NIST sponsors these grants to encourage basic, measurement-related research and to foster contacts between NIST scientists and U.S. academic institutions actively engaged in such work. The grants also are intended to enable researchers to pursue new, fundamental measurement ideas for which there are few to no other sources of support. CONTACT: Peter Mohr, (301) 975-3217; mohr@ nist.gov. News Briefs