Bruce Oldaker, PhD

Bruce G. Oldaker is a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology who earned his doctorate at MIT for research on the transfer of momentum from light to atoms through multi-photon interactions. Oldaker received his Hertz Fellowship in 1985 and completed his doctorate in physics at MIT, where his dissertation examined multi-photon momentum transfer, a process central to understanding how repeated absorption and emission of photons from laser beams can slow and trap atoms. That era of research, developed in parallel with work that would later earn the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, laid the groundwork for modern atomic physics experiments.