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Carl Wieman of the University of Colorado at Boulder and Eric Cornell of the National Institute of Standards and Technology have been awarded the 1999 R.W. Wood Prize from the Optical Society of America.

The award honors an outstanding discovery, scientific or technological achievement, or invention in the field of optics. Wieman and Cornell were cited "for their creative inventiveness and persistent ingenuity applied to the development of laser techniques for cooling atoms, which led to the first demonstration of Bose-Einstein condensation of an atomic vapor."

Wieman is a distinguished professor of physics and has taught at ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ-Boulder since 1984. Cornell is a senior scientist at NIST and an adjoint professor of physics at ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ-Boulder. Both teach undergraduate and graduate students and both are fellows of JILA, a joint institute of ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ-Boulder and NIST.

Wieman has carried out research in laser spectroscopy of atoms, with an emphasis on laser cooling and trapping and the measurement of parity violation. The latter work has made "table-top" measurements of elementary particle physics that are competitive with the largest particle accelerators. He currently is studying the properties of Bose-Einstein condensates and developing simpler and better techniques for cooling and trapping atoms.

Cornell's research interests center around various aspects of laser cooling, including Bose-Einstein condensation and an experiment on atoms guided by optical forces inside hollow glass fibers. He also is building an atom-wave interferometer for ultra-sensitive inertial sensing.

The award was presented Sept. 27 at the Optical Society of America's annual meeting in Santa Clara, Calif. The organization is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and has more than 12,500 members worldwide.

¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ-Boulder's physics department is part of the College of Arts and Sciences.