Eric Allin Cornell

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Eric Allin Cornell was born on the 19th of December, 1961, in Palo Alto, California, to parents who were finishing graduate degrees at Stanford University. Within two years, the family had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father joined MIT as a professor of civil engineering. That early pattern of following academic parents across cities and continents would shape the man who, three decades later, would create something that had never existed before in the physical universe: a new state of matter cold enough to reveal the quantum nature of atoms in bulk.

  The question of what happens when a collection of atoms is cooled to within a hair's breadth of absolute zero had been theoretical for most of the twentieth century. Cornell and his collaborator Carl Wieman answered it in 1995, producing the first Bose-Einstein condensate. The Nobel Prize in Physics followed in 2001, shared with Wolfgang Ketterle. But the path from a Cambridge schoolboy to a Nobel laureate was anything but straight. It ran through China, Taiwan, a near-fatal infection, and a long detour through a career in literature or politics that Cornell once seriously considered.

• 2. A Circuitous Education

  ›

  Cambridge Rindge and Latin School was where Cornell spent most of his secondary years, in the shadow of MIT where his father taught. The year before graduation, he moved back to California with his mother and finished at Lowell High School in San Francisco, a magnet school for academically talented students. Stanford came next, and it was there he met Celeste Landry, whom he would later marry.

  As an undergraduate, Cornell earned money working as an assistant in Stanford's low-temperature physics groups. He was doing well in his courses and in the lab, yet he was genuinely uncertain whether physics was the right path. Literature and politics pulled at him. Halfway through his undergraduate years, he left for China and Taiwan for nine months, volunteering as a teacher of conversational English and studying Chinese. He came back to Stanford with his mind made up. He graduated with honors and distinction in 1985.

  For graduate school he returned to Cambridge, this time to MIT, and joined the group of David Pritchard. The experiment underway there attempted to measure the mass of the electron neutrino from the beta decay of tritium. Cornell could not determine that mass, but he earned his PhD in 1990, and the rigorous training in precision measurement would prove indispensable for everything that followed.

• 3. The Condensate Plan

  ›

  In 1990, Cornell moved to Boulder, Colorado, to join Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado as a postdoctoral researcher. The experiment was a small laser cooling setup. During those two years as a postdoc, Cornell developed a plan: combine laser cooling with evaporative cooling inside a magnetic trap, and push a gas of atoms cold enough to form a Bose-Einstein condensate.

  A Bose-Einstein condensate is a state of matter predicted by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein in the 1920s. When bosons are cooled to temperatures near absolute zero, they collapse into the lowest quantum energy state, behaving collectively as a single quantum object. For decades, reaching those temperatures with a dilute gas of atoms seemed technically out of reach. Cornell's plan was specific enough to be taken seriously. Based on his proposal, he was offered a permanent position at JILA, a joint institute of the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, located in Boulder.

  In 1995, Cornell and Wieman succeeded. They synthesized the first Bose-Einstein condensate, a milestone that put Boulder on the map of fundamental physics and set off a wave of experiments around the world. That same year Cornell and Wieman gave the University of Colorado's George Gamow Memorial Lecture, and Cornell married Celeste Landry, with the wedding taking place mere months before the condensate experiment succeeded.

• 4. Recognition and the Nobel

  ›

  The awards began arriving almost immediately after the condensate was announced. Cornell received the Samuel Wesley Stratton Award from the National Institute of Science and Technology in 1995, and the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the 1995-96 cycle. The Carl Zeiss Award, the Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics, and the Department of Commerce Gold Medal all followed in 1996, along with the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering.

  By 1997, the pace had not slowed. That year Cornell received the I. I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics from the American Physical Society, the King Faisal International Prize in Science, and the National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award. The Lorentz Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences came in 1998, and the R. W. Wood Prize and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics both arrived in 1999.

  The Nobel Prize in Physics followed in 2001, shared with Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle. Cornell became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. The Ioannes Marcus Marci Medal for Molecular Spectroscopy, awarded by the Ioannes Marcus Marci Spectroscopic Society in the Czech Republic, came in 2012. His position at JILA and NIST, where he holds the title of NIST fellow, has continued alongside his professorship at the University of Colorado Boulder.

• 5. Deborah Jin and the Fermionic Condensate

  ›

  In 1997, Deborah S. Jin joined Cornell's group at JILA. Her arrival expanded the scope of what the lab was pursuing. Fermions, unlike the bosons used in the original BEC experiment, obey the Pauli exclusion principle, which forbids two identical fermions from occupying the same quantum state. Producing a condensate from fermions required a different strategy, pairing them so they could behave collectively.

  Jin led the team that achieved exactly that, producing the fermionic condensate in 2003. Cornell's first and second daughters were born in 1996 and 1998, years when the lab's pace of discovery was at its most intense. The overlap of family life and frontier science in Boulder during those years produced not only the Nobel Prize but also, through Jin's work, a new chapter in the physics of ultracold matter.

• 6. Necrotizing Fasciitis

  ›

  In October 2004, surgeons amputated Cornell's left arm and shoulder in an attempt to stop the spread of necrotizing fasciitis, a rapidly advancing bacterial infection that destroys soft tissue. The procedure was drastic but necessary. Cornell was discharged from the hospital in mid-December 2004, having recovered from the infection itself.

  He returned to work part-time in April 2005, less than six months after the amputation. His election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences also came in 2005, a coincidence of timing that placed a major honor in the same year as his return to the lab. Cornell has run in the Bolder Boulder race multiple times since moving to Boulder in 1990, most recently in 2022, a detail that speaks to his sustained presence in the city where he did the work that defined his career.