Physicist Jun Ye Wins Wolf Prize in Physics

What happened

Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been awarded the 2026 Wolf Prize in Physics . The award cites Ye’s achievement in “transformative, widely applicable advances in the control of ultracold atomic systems.”

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The award, often considered the second most prestigious award in the physical sciences, after the Nobel Prize in Physics, cited Ye’s achievement in “transformative, widely applicable advances in the control of ultracold atomic systems.” Ye, a physicist at JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder, shares the prize with Immanuel Bloch, the scientific director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany.