Ultracold atoms and quantum gases

Augusto Smerzi

Augusto Smerzi is an Italian theoretical physicist at CNR-INO's Institute of Optics in Florence, known for the 1997 prediction of macroscopic quantum self-trapping and for entanglement-based quantum metrology.

Brian P. Anderson

Brian P. Anderson is an American atomic physicist at the University of Arizona who studies Bose-Einstein condensates and received the 2003 Presidential Early Career Award.

Chad D. Fertig

Chad D. Fertig is an American atomic physicist at the University of Georgia known for experiments with ultracold atoms and Bose-Einstein condensates, and the 2007 PECASE award.

Christian Groß

Christian Groß is a German experimental physicist who leads a research group in the Center for Quantum Science at the University of Tübingen, holding a Heisenberg Professorship.

Christophe I. Westbrook

Christophe I. Westbrook is a CNRS research director at the Institut d'Optique in Orsay who, with Alain Aspect, created the first Bose–Einstein condensate of metastable helium in 2001.

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, born 1933 in Constantine, Algeria, is a French physicist at the Collège de France who won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for laser cooling of atoms.

Dan Stamper-Kurn

Dan M. Stamper-Kurn is an experimental atomic physicist, Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley since 2001, known for work on ultracold atomic gases, magnetism in quantum fluids, and cavity optomechanics.

David S. Weiss

David S. Weiss is an American atomic physicist at Pennsylvania State University known for the 2006 quantum Newton's cradle experiment showing one-dimensional Bose gases fail to thermalize.

Deborah S. Jin

Deborah S. Jin (1968–2016) was an American physicist at JILA, a NIST and University of Colorado institute, who created the first fermionic condensate in 2003.

Dieter Jaksch

Dieter Jaksch is an Austrian theoretical quantum physicist who has been Professor of Physics at the University of Hamburg since 2021 and works on ultracold atoms and quantum information.

Edward Hinds

Edward Hinds is a British physicist, Fellow of the Royal Society, who pioneered ultracold-atom physics, made the first Casimir–Polder force measurement, and directed Imperial College London's Centre for Cold Matter.

Eric Cornell

Eric Cornell is an American physicist at NIST and JILA in Boulder who created the first Bose-Einstein condensate in a gas, winning the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Hanns-Christoph Nägerl

Hanns-Christoph Nägerl, born 1967, is a German experimental physicist and full professor at the University of Innsbruck known for ultracold atoms, molecules, and quantum many-body physics.

Ian B. Spielman

Ian B. Spielman (born 1976) is an American atomic physicist at NIST and a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute, known for engineering synthetic gauge fields in ultracold atoms.

Jacob L. Roberts

Jacob L. Roberts is an American atomic physicist and professor at Colorado State University known for the first stable rubidium-85 Bose-Einstein condensates and a 2006 PECASE award.

Jean Dalibard

Jean Dalibard, born in 1958, is a French physicist at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel and the Collège de France known for laser cooling of atoms and quantum gases.

John L. Bohn

John L. Bohn is a theoretical physicist and JILA Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder, known for the collision physics of ultracold atoms and dipolar quantum gases.

John M. Doyle

John M. Doyle is a Harvard physicist who pioneered buffer-gas cooling of molecules, laser-cooled a polyatomic molecule, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and became APS president in 2025.

Jook Walraven

Jook Walraven is an atomic physicist who, with his supervisor Isaac Silvera, first stabilized spin-polarized atomic hydrogen in 1980, creating the first studied dilute quantum gas.

Kenneth Martin O'Hara

Kenneth Martin O'Hara is an American experimental atomic physicist, formerly Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University, known for ultracold fermionic lithium-6 gases, Efimov physics, and a 2005 PECASE award.

Lene V. Hau

Lene V. Hau, also known as Lene Vestergaard Hau, is a Danish physicist at Harvard who led experiments slowing light to 17 m/s in 1999 and stopping it in 2001.

Manuel Endres

Manuel Endres is a German-born experimental physicist, professor of physics at Caltech since 2021, who builds optical tweezer arrays of individually controlled atoms for quantum science.

Mark G. Raizen

Mark G. Raizen is an American experimental physicist at the University of Texas at Austin whose lab observed non-exponential quantum tunnelling decay and measured a Brownian particle's velocity.

Markus K. Oberthaler

Markus K. Oberthaler (born 1968) is an experimental physicist, professor at Heidelberg University since 2003, known for entanglement in Bose–Einstein condensates and a quantum field simulator of curved spacetime.

Martin Weitz

Martin Weitz is a German experimental physicist and professor at the University of Bonn, known for the Bose–Einstein condensate of photons reported in Nature in 2010.

Sep 20, 2026

Masahito Ueda

Masahito Ueda (上田正仁) is a Japanese theoretical physicist at the University of Tokyo known for work on ultracold atomic gases, quantum information, and non-Hermitian topology.

Michèle Léduc

Michèle Léduc is a French CNRS physicist at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel in Paris who co-led the group that produced one of the first two Bose–Einstein condensates of metastable helium in 2001.

Mikio Kozuma

Mikio Kozuma (上妻幹旺) is a Japanese atomic physicist who, in 1999 at the University of Tokyo, demonstrated phase-coherent amplification of matter waves simultaneously with MIT's group.

Nigel Cooper

Nigel R. Cooper is a British theoretical physicist, professor at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, known for research on ultracold atoms, quantum gases, and topological phases of matter.