Steven Chu is a Chinese American physicist, whose ancestral home is at Taicang, Jiangsu Province. Chu was born in St. Louis, Missouri in USA. He graduated from the University of Rochester in 1970, and was awarded a doctoral degree by the University of California in Berkeley in 1976. He worked for Bell Labs at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company from 1978 to 1987, and once served as the head of the quantum electronics research department. Later, Chu became a professor and director of the Physics Department of Stanford University. In 1993, he was selected to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chu served as Secretary of Energy of the United States under the former president Barack Obama’s administration. He has engaged in long-term research on atomic physics and laser science. In 1985, Chu invented the new method of cooling and trapping atoms by lasers, which is an outstanding experimental achievement in atomic and molecular physics. As a major theoretical breakthrough in physics, it has enabled researchers to manipulate substances in fields beyond their predecessors’ reach, and contributed significantly to the improvement of human knowledge about the interaction between radiation and matter. Moreover, it has helped deepen people’s understanding of the quantum physical properties of gases in low-temperature conditions, and thus made it possible to conduct precise research on individual atoms and their internal structures. The scientific significance and practical value of this breakthrough are obvious in various fields. For example, Chu’s method can be used to develop an atomic clock with an accuracy 100 times better than the current one (by one billionth), which means the divergence is as low as 1 second every 30 million years. It has helped to improve the positioning accuracy of the global positioning system from about 10 meters to less than 1 meter. Moreover, this technology can be employed to develop atomic gyroscopes with high sensitivity for accurate determination of the deposits and locations of underground minerals. Besides, it can be applied to reduce the speed of light from up to 300,000 kilometers per second to zero. The technology of laser cooling of atoms Chu and his colleagues worked out can be adopted to measure the physical properties of DNA fragments and thus unlock the genetic codes of organisms. Due to these achievements, Chu won the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics together with William Phillips from the United States and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji from France. In 1998, he was elected as a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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