Wolfgang Ketterle

Wolfgang Ketterle (born 1957) is a German physicist who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been a professor of physics since the 1990s and later directed the Center for Ultracold Atoms. Born in Heidelberg, he studied in Heidelberg and Munich and earned his doctorate in experimental molecular spectroscopy at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching. His research traps and cools atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero. His group at MIT produced a Bose-Einstein condensate in 1995, demonstrated interference between two condensates and built the first atom laser in 1997, and later created a molecular condensate and found evidence of high-temperature superfluidity in a fermionic gas. For the condensate work he shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics with Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman.