A Nobel for Chu
— three in a row for physics
BY DAVID F. SALISBURY AND
JANET BASU
After he successfully
chilled atoms to ultralow temperatures and then trapped
them with laser light, physicist Steven Chu ran into his
bosses' boss at Bell Labs. "I sat down next to him
and said, 'Guess what? We've managed to trap atoms.'
"He replied,
'Great. What can you do with trapped atoms?'
"I said, 'I don't
know, but isn't it great?' "
It turned out to be.
On Oct. 15, Chu learned
that he would share the Nobel Prize in physics for the
work on the fundamental interplay between light and
atomic particles that he began in 1985 at Bell and
continued at Stanford.
His co-winners are Claude
Cohen-Tannoudji, a professor at the Collège de France
and École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and William D.
Phillips, who works at the National Institute of
Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md.
The techniques they have
developed independently are being used to design more
precise atomic clocks for use in space navigation; atomic
interferometers to provide ultra-precise measurements of
gravitational forces; and atomic lasers, which might one
day be used to manufacture extremely small electronic
components.
Related
Information:
Chu, the Theodore and
Frances Geballe Professor of Physics and Applied Physics,
almost did not get the phone call from Stockholm
confirming his selection. Academy officials had tried to
reach him in the middle of the night using the
peninsula's old 415 area code. Their calls wouldn't go
through and the phone system did not tell them that a new
area code was required.
So when Chu got a 3 a.m.
phone call from a radio reporter asking him to comment on
winning this year's Nobel prize, Chu, like many previous
laureates, thought it was a hoax and refused to comment.
("I have a lot of practical jokers in my lab,"
he notes.)
But then the deluge of
calls began, and by daybreak Chu already had given more
than 20 phone interviews to reporters from around the
nation and the world. Television crews showed up at his
doorstep at 6 a.m. to tape his reaction, and a 10 a.m.
news conference in Tresidder Union was beamed around the
world.
The academy finally
reached Chu at 1 p.m., 11 hours after the official
announcement, and he became Stanford's third winner of
the Nobel Prize in physics in three years.
During the barrage of
calls from reporters, Chu took time to call his family:
his brothers, Gilbert Chu, M.D., a professor of oncology
at Stanford School of Medicine, and Morgan Chu, a Los
Angeles intellectual property lawyer; his sleepy but
elated sons, Michael, 13, and Geoffrey, 16. and his
father, Ju Chin Chu, a retired professor of chemical
engineering who taught at a number of American
universities, most notably Brooklyn Polytechnic
University.
Ju Chin Chu was born near
Shanghai, but left China in the mid-1940s. He has long
been a member of Taiwan's most distinguished scholarly
society, the Academica Sinica. Recently, when Steven Chu
was named a member, they became one of the few father-son
teams to be so honored. For years the elder Chu had been
telling his physicist son that he was ready and willing
to accompany him to Stockholm. "I'll pay my own
fare!" he often has said. Wednesday morning, his son
ended the phone call by saying, "Get ready to go to
Sweden."
Asian interest
Winning the prize boosted
Chu to celebrity status in both Taipei and Beijing. He
was already well known in both capitals, having met with
leaders from both countries. So great was the media
interest that Chu held a second news conference on
Thursday specifically for Asian journalists, who
expressed less interest in his scientific discoveries
than in his life and his opinions about subjects such as
Asian education.
Chu opened the session by
saying that, while his parents are Chinese, "I am an
American. I was born here and raised here and the United
States has invested heavily in my education. The Nobel
Prize does not make me an expert on politics. I hold
opinions, but they may be opinions out of
ignorance."
Chu was born Feb. 28,
1948, in St. Louis, and raised primarily on Long Island,
N.Y. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1970 from the
University of Rochester in New York, with dual degrees in
physics and mathematics, and a doctorate in physics from
the University of California-Berkeley in 1976. He was a
postdoctoral fellow at UC-Berkeley until 1978, when he
joined AT&T Bell Laboratories (now part of Lucent
Technologies) in New Jersey. In 1987 he moved to the
departments of physics and applied physics at Stanford.
Chu has been on the list
of possible Nobel prize winners for a number of years. He
said that he tried each year not to get his hopes up
and expressed relief that the waiting is over. He also
downplayed the importance of his selection, at one point
saying that the main reason he got the award was because
he was lucky.
Chu noted that he and his
colleagues were not being honored for an "eureka
experiment" like the discovery of superfluidity in
helium-3 that won fellow physics Professor Douglas
Osheroff the Nobel Prize last year. Instead, "It was
for a body of many experiments done not only by the three
that were honored today, but also by a number of other
truly fantastic physicists."
Taught course
Despite all the media
interest, Chu broke the Nobel day news conference to
prepare for his 11 a.m. quantum mechanics course. When he
stopped by his office, he saw that the physics department
notice board was festooned with balloons and the greeting
"Congrat-Chu-lations," and his office was
decorated and filled with messages from friends and
well-wishers.
Most of the graduate
students in his class were already seated when he reached
the lecture hall. Salted among them were colleagues such
as Calvin Quate, the Leland T. Edwards Professor of
Electrical Engineering (research); Stephen Harris, the
Kenneth and Barbara Oshman Professor of Applied Physics;
and Chu's companion, Jean Fetter, who holds a physics
doctorate from Oxford. They gave Chu a standing ovation.
A few minutes after Chu
launched into his scheduled lecture, a student spoke up,
"Professor Chu, can we just hear about laser
cooling?"
"You're missing one
of my best lectures," Chu groused. "There's a
lot of philosophy in this one." Then, obviously
delighted, he launched into a detailed explanation of
just how he had used lasers to chill and trap sodium
atoms.
As he raised the lecture
hall's projection screen to use the blackboard. Chu
discovered a poem, drafted on the spur of the moment by
Richard Swartz, one of his doctoral students. Titled
"with homage to William Blake," it began:
Sodium, Sodium burning
bright
In the coils of the
night
What great hand, what
great eye
Trapped thy fearful
symmetry?
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