Bill Phillips with a laser trap, 1990s. US physicist William D. 'Bill' Phillips (born 1948) observing a glowing cloud of sodium atoms caught by six intersecting laser beams. Laser cooling slows atoms or molecules to near absolute zero. Phillips carried out this work in the 1980s and 1990s at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The work was done at the Gaithersburg site, Maryland, USA. By 1988, the research group had achieved record-breaking low temperatures, disproving then-current theories on low-temperature physics. Phillips joined the NBS in 1978 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. This image is from 'Laser Trapping 1991' in the NIST Archives.