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John Hall became CU-Boulder’s fourth faculty member to win a Nobel Prize.

Engineering Physics: CU-Boulder Celebrates its Fourth Nobel Prize, Third in Physics

In 2005, CU physicist and JILA fellow John Hall became CU-Boulder's fourth faculty member to win a Nobel Prize and its third to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Hall and Theodor Hänsch of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich shared the prize for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy. Their contributions have made it possible to measure

frequencies with an accuracy of 15 digits. Lasers with extremely sharp colors can now be constructed, and with the frequency comb technique, precise readings can be made of light of all colors.

Hall is a preeminent laser experimentalist, concentrating on improving the precision and accuracy with which lasers can produce a specific, sharp frequency or color of light, and the stability to hold that frequency. His work has been essential to precision spectroscopy for physical and chemical analysis, new tests and measurements of fundamental physical laws and constants, time and length, metrology, and fiber-optic communications.

CU-Boulder Professor Thomas Cech won the university's first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989 for discovering that RNA can act as a catalyst in cell development. In 2001, professors Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell won the Nobel Prize in Physics for creating the world's first Bose-Einstein condensate, a new form of matter that occurs at just a few hundred billionths of a degree above absolute zero.

Wieman and Cornell, like Hall, are fellows of JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and NIST. "JILA has created an environment in which excellence of research and post-graduate training can prosper," says Hall.

The Department of Physics has been enriched by its involvement in JILA, and student enrollment in the Engineering Physics Program has grown to 70 undergraduate majors.