Happy birthday to Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterle who was born today in 1957 in Heidelberg, West Germany. After earning his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Ketterle began working at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics. In 1995, the team he was leading was one of the first to create a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and provided some of the earliest studies on the substances. For this work he was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics (along with Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, who led the group that was the first to create a BEC). He has continued to study the behavior of supercold atoms, creating the first molecular BEC in 2003 and demonstrating high temperature superfluidity in a fermionic condensate.
