Wineland, David Jeffrey (1944-…), an American physicist, won the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics. He shared the prize with the French physicist Serge Haroche. They won for their work in isolating and studying quantum particles. Such particles include atoms and subatomic particles, particles smaller than atoms. The two scientists worked independently. Wineland trapped ions (charged atoms). Haroche trapped photons (particles of light).
Quantum physics is the study of how quantum particles behave. The English scientist Sir Isaac Newton in the late 1600’s became the first person to describe the physics that governs the objects we see around us. However, tiny quantum particles do not always behave in the way Newton determined for larger objects. For example, certain quantum particles can be in two places at the same time. Most physicists once thought it impossible to study these particles without disturbing their behavior. Many physicists also believed that the particles could not be studied without destroying them.
Wineland first began to develop an ion trap in the 1970’s. His design trapped the ions in an extremely cold vacuum chamber. Electric fields held the electrically charged particles in place. By the 1980’s, single ions had been trapped by several groups of scientists, including Wineland’s group. Wineland would later devise a technique to study the trapped ions without disturbing their behavior or destroying them.
Wineland’s work enabled more accurate measurement of a single atom than ever before. It thus led to the creation of an atomic clock 100 times more accurate than the atomic clock used to keep the official international standard of time. An atomic clock keeps time by counting vibrations of a single atom. Both Wineland’s work and Haroche’s work have contributed greatly to the development of quantum computing, the attempt to make a computer that uses quantum particles to perform calculations. Traditional computers use electronic switches called transistors and diodes to do this work. Scientists think replacing these devices with particles may greatly increase the speed of a computer.
David Jeffrey Wineland was born on Feb. 24, 1944, in Milwaukee. He received his B.A. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965. He received his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1970 from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He then worked at the University of Washington in Seattle before joining the National Bureau of Standards, now called the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in 1975.
See also Haroche, Serge .
