Nobel Prize Chinese Americans Winners 

Steven Chu

Date of Birth:	February 28, 1948
Place of Birth:	St. Louis, MO.
Received Ph.D.:	1976
U.S. citizenship:	By birth
Nobel Prize:	1997 in Physics

	Dr. Steven Chu won his Nobel Prize in physics in 1997 based on his
laser-trapping cooling of atoms to within thousandth of a degree above
the absolute zero temperature.

	Honors: Fellow of the American Physical Society, 1987; Fellow of the
Optical Society of America, 1990; a member of the U.S. National Academy of
Sciences, 1993; a member of the Academy Sinica, 1994; and a Guggenhein Fellow, 1996.  He received: Borida Prize for Laser Spectroscopy, American Physical Society, 1987;  APS/AAPT Richtmyer Memorial Prize Lecture, 1990; the King Faisal International Prize for Science, 1993;  Arther Schawlow Prize for Laser Science, American Physical Society 1994; William F. Meggers Award for Spectroscopy, Optical Society of America, 1994; and Science for Art and Humboldt Senior Scientist Award, 1995.

	As the latest Chinese American Nobel Prize winner, Dr Steven Chu's desire for an academic life is not surprising. His maternal grandfather was sent to the United States to study by the Chinese government. A great uncle was a physicist who studied under a French Nobel Prize winner.  His parents came to the United States in 1944. Both enrolled in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received their Ph. Ds.

	Growing up in Long Island, New York, Steven Chu received his Bachelor of Science degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Rochester in the State of New York. In 1976, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a postdoctoral fellow until 1978.

	Dr. Chu worked as a technical staff at AT&T from 1978 to 1983, then he became the Head of Quantum Electronic Department at AT&T's Bell Laboratories. In 1985, he developed a way of trapping thousands of gas atoms using lasers. The atoms are bombarded from six sides by lasers so that they can not move from a single point.  Heat is the product of atomic motion, so the less an atom move, the colder it is.  Dr. Chu's laser-trapping method can cool atoms within a thousandth of a degrees above absolute zero, the theoretical point where all atomic motion ceases. He continued his research in Stanford University where he became Professor of Physics and Applied Physics in 1987.  An invention of Dr. Chu's laser-based cooling, dubbed as the "atomic fountain," can improve the precision of atomic clocks 100 times. Atomic clocks are normally accurate to one second in 32 million years; Dr. Chu's improvement makes them accurate to a second in more than three billion years.  Dr Chu won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery.