Dr. William Daniel Phillips, a 1970 graduate of Juniata College, has considered himself a scientist from early in life. “Almost as far back as I can remember,” he wrote in his Nobel Prize autobiography, “I was interested in science. I assembled a collection of bottles and household substances as my “chemistry set” and examined almost anything I could find with the microscope my parents gave me.” Later, Dr. Phillips’ career took him much further. In 1997, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Chu of Stanford University and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji of College de France and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.

The researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work in developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

Dr. Phillips was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1948 and was raised in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, graduated from Juniata College summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics. From Juniata, Dr. Phillips earned his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. He currently works at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

During his childhood, Dr. Phillips was passionate about everything from fishing to baseball to tree climbing, as well as science. But eventually science won his heart more intensely as he spent more time with his Erector sets, microscopes and chemistry sets. “I spent many hours experimenting with fire, explosives, rockets, and carbon arcs. But life was not all science. I ran for the track team and played for the tennis team at school. During the summer I spent all day either on the tennis courts or in the community swimming pool, and considered the advantages of life as a tennis bum.”

As an undergraduate student, Dr. Phillips showed signs of his capability, according to Dr. Wilfred Norris, professor of physics at Juniata College. “He was one of my very best students,” said Dr. Norris, who joined the Juniata faculty in 1958. “He always asked a lot of questions as a way of pushing for more information. He conducted a research project with me as an undergraduate student, and he had a gift for picking up information and building on it. He could work independently even as an undergraduate. I always knew he had great skills and potential for success, but you can never predict something like winning a Nobel Prize.”

Dr. Phillips credits much of his success to his well-taught science and math classes, but also to the teachers that helped him to develop his language and writing skills that helped him to advance his career. In addition, Phillips had ample opportunity for hands-on learning through experiments. While a junior in high school, Dr. Phillips worked at the University of Delaware under the watchful eye of Jim Comas, a graduate student who imparted the bit of wisdom, “An experimental physicist is someone who gets paid for working at his hobby.” From there he went on to great success in the area of physics.

The work of Dr. Phillips and professors Chu and Cohen-Tannoudji in the field of laser cooling and trapping has meant a breakthrough for both theory and experiment within the field and has led to a deeper understanding of the interaction between light and matter. It has also led to an intense world-wide activity within the atomic, molecular and optical physics community and has, in particular, opened up new roads towards the study of the quantum behavior of dilute atomic vapors at very low temperatures. The techniques of laser cooling and trapping are used in fundamental high-resolution spectroscopy and the study of ultra-cold collisions. They also find application in the construction of atomic clocks, atomic interferometers and atom lasers, and in the development of instruments for atom optics and atomic lithography. Recent applications related to the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics are the first observation of Bose-Einstein condensation in a dilute atomic gas and the development of the first rudimentary atom laser.

Magnetic fields had already been used at the beginning of the 1980s by Dr. Phillips and his co-workers in a method of slowing down and completely stopping atoms in slow atomic beams. Dr. Phillips had developed what was termed a Zeeman slower, a coil with a varying magnetic field, along the axis of which atoms could be retarded by an opposed laser beam. With his device Dr. Phillips had in 1985 stopped and captured sodium atoms in a purely magnetic trap. Enclosure in this trap, however, is relatively weak, for which reason the atoms within it must be extremely cold to remain inside. When Dr. Chu managed to cool atoms in optical molasses, Dr. Phillips designed a similar experiment and started a systematic study of the temperature of the atoms in the molasses. He developed several new methods of measuring the temperature, including one in which the atoms are allowed to fall under the influence of gravity, the curve of their fall being determined with the help of a measuring laser.

As an undergraduate student, Dr. Phillips was active in student affairs, which included participating in the Forensics Club and Honors Society. Dr. Phillips has occasionally returned to the Juniata College campus to conduct seminars on his work.