October 11, 2001	Thursday	Rajab 23, 1422

BOULDER (USA): They are a team, whether working in a laboratory on a project that will rewrite science books or finishing each other’s sentences at a news conference after winning a share of the Nobel prize for Physics on Tuesday.

Carl Wieman, 50, is shy and soft-spoken, while Eric Cornell, 39, flashes a quick smile and is always ready with a quip.

And while Cornell had already lined up a baby sitter for his two children so he could celebrate the honor, Wieman had the press conference moved up 15 minutes so he would be on time for his passion, teaching a university class called “physics for the non-scientist.”

Cornell and Wieman along with Germany’s Wolfgang Ketterle, 43, won the prestigious one million dollars prize for creating a form of matter, something Albert Einstein predicted in the 1920s.

“We know each other very well,” Ketterle said of his co-winners. “We have been racing and hunting for this new matter.”

Cornell, from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, and Wieman, 50, of the University of Colorado, created in 1995 the coldest place in the universe by building an “atom trap” with magnetic fields to skim off hot atoms, hugely magnifying the natural way a cup of coffee cools.

THEY KNEW IT WAS BIG: Since the stunning discovery was announced six years ago, Nobel talk has surrounded the duo. When Wieman was asked at a news conference if he had ever dreamed the two would win a Nobel prize, he very modestly answered “To be honest, yeah.”

“This just jumped right out at you,” he said of the 1995 success in the laboratory.

Cornell and Wieman found that they could cool atoms to temperatures far lower than ever before, allowing them to create a new state of matter.

In their experiment, atoms of an element called rubidium were cooled to less than 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero, causing them to condense into a “superatom” that behaves like a single entity — or a new form of matter.

But they were surprised the highest honor in science came so early after the discovery, Cornell said. The Royal SwedishAcademy of Sciences usually bestows its prizes years and even decades after an important discovery.

Cornell was also surprised to be awakened before dawn this morning by a former thesis advisor who called, assuming he was about the 10th person to congratulate his former student. “I said ‘No, you’re the first person to wake me up’,” Cornell said.

Both Wieman and Cornell are fellows of JILA, a joint venture of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, also in Boulder, Colorado.

Cornell said the interdisciplinary joint venture means students can work alongside professionals.

“This is not at all fantasy,” Cornell said. Being able to make atoms stand still will open doors for creating more precise measurements in such endeavors as global positioning, the scientists said. —Reuters