David Wineland

David Wineland (born February 24, 1944, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, U.S.) is an American physicist who was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physics for devising methods to study the quantum mechanical behaviour of individual ions. He shared the prize with French physicist Serge Haroche.

Wineland received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965 and a doctorate in physics from Harvard University in 1970. He was then a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, and from 1975 to 2017 he worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. He later taught at the University of Oregon.

Wineland’s work concentrated on studying individual ions trapped in an electric field. Beginning in 1978 he and his collaborators used laser pulses of light at specific wavelengths to cool the ions to their lowest energy state, and in 1995 they placed the ions in a superposition of two different quantum states. Placing an ion in a superposed state allowed the study of quantum mechanical behaviour that had previously only been the subject of thought experiments, such as the famous Schrödinger’s cat. (In the 1930s German physicist Erwin Schrödinger, as a demonstration of the philosophical paradoxes involved in quantum theory, proposed a closed box in which a cat whose life depends on the possible radioactive decay of a particle would be both alive and dead until it is directly observed.)

On the practical side, Wineland’s group in 1995 used trapped ions to perform logical operations in one of the first demonstrations of quantum computing. In the early 2000s Wineland’s group used trapped ions to create an atomic clock much more accurate than those using cesium. In 2010 they used their clock to test Einstein’s theory of relativity on very small scales, detecting time dilation at speeds of only 36 km (22 miles) per hour and gravitational time dilation between two clocks spaced vertically only 33 cm (13 inches) apart.