The Nobel Prize in Physics 1997
Awarded on: 1997-10-15
"for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light"
Affiliations:
- Stanford University – Stanford, CA, USA
Steven Chu
Born: 1948-02-28 in St. Louis, MO, USA
Gender: male
Field: American physicist and former U.S. Secretary of Energy (born 1948)
Biography
Steven Chu is an American physicist and former government official. He is a Nobel laureate and was the 12th U.S. secretary of energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley, and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.