John L. Hall
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John L. Hall (born 1934) is an American physicist. He shared one half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics with Theodor W. Hänsch for his work in precision spectroscopy.
Hall holds three degrees from Carnegie Institute of Technology, a B.S. (1956), an M.S. (1958), and a Ph.D. 1961. He completed his postdoctoral studies at the Department of Commerce's National Bureau of Standards (now known as NIST) and then worked there from 1962 to 1971. He has lectured at the University of Colorado at Boulder since 1967.
Hall is currently a fellow at JILA (formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) and Physics lecturer at the CU Boulder Physics department. JILA is a research institute managed jointly by CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Hall's Nobel prize was awarded for "contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique". The other half of the prize was awarded to Roy J. Glauber.
Hall has received several other honors for his pioneering work, including the Optical Society of America's Max Born Award "for pioneering the field of stable lasers, including their applications in fundamental physics and, most recently, in the stabilization of femtosecond lasers to provide dramatic advances in optical frequency metrology."
Hall's prize marks the third received by JILA scientists. In 2001, Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman (a student of Theodor W. Hänsch) each won one-third of the prize for "the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates".
