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"The biggest reward is to make discoveries, the thrill of seeing new glimpses of nature. Of course it's nice to be recognized," said Ketterle, 43, who shared the prize for helping create a state of ultra-cold matter that could lead to the development of faster and smaller electronics.

Ketterle said he was awakened by the news he had won the Nobel Prize.

"I was sleeping. They called me at 5:30 and said they had some good news," he said.

The German-born Ketterle will split the $943,000 award with MIT alumni Eric A. Cornell, 39, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo.; and Carl E. Wieman, 50, of the University of Colorado. Cornell and Wieman also work at JILA, a research institute in Boulder formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics.

At Ketterle's office, a steady stream of his graduate students and co-workers came by to high-five and back-slap Tuesday morning.

He brought his two sons, Jonas, 15, and Holger, 9, to share the excitement. "The best part is probably note having to go to school," Holger said.

Kettlerle was working at his desk, where his sons said he had 22 voice messages and 129 e-mails awaiting him.

Ketterle said he was a little worried that the honor might mean he wouldn't be able to devote as much time to his research.

"I think there will be more demands on my time and I'll have to juggle more responsibilities. I am a spokesperson for the field now."

Ketterle repeatedly deflected attention from himself, telling well-wishers that MIT deserved the credit for allowing him to come and giving him the facilities to do his research. Ketterle came to MIT in 1990.

His graduate students said he's excellent experimental physicist who often works 100 hours a week, but is also a joy to work with, a patient advisor.

"He has a lot of intuition, he really knows what's important. He has a great feel for the experiment -- what can be done, what's possible. He tell's us what to do, we do it and it works," said Jamil Abo-Shaeer, 24, a grad student who works in Ketterle's lab.

Ketterle, Cornell and Wieman jointly created the ultra-cold Bose-Einstein condensate in 1995. The new technology could eventually be used to draw computer circuits by depositing a stream of atoms on a circuit board.

The advances are "going to bring revolutionary applications in such fields as precision measurement and nanotechnology," or micro-machines, according to the citation by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The research will also help scientists measure fundamental properties of matter.

The Nobel prize was "only a matter of time" for Ketterle, according to Professor Gerhard Rempe, managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, where Ketterle worked before moving to the U.S.

Rempe praised Ketterle's "vision," and described him as "a passionate researcher and a passionate physician" who had overcome doubts as to whether the matter could be created.

The term Bose-Einstein refers to Indian physicist S.N. Bose and Albert Einstein. As early as 1924, Bose did statistical research on light particles called photons and sent his work to Einstein, who extended the theory to cover mass.

Einstein predicted that when particles slow down and approach each other, they produce a new state of matter. Other states of matter include solids, liquids and gases.

To obtain ultra-cold atoms, Ketterle and his group use techniques such as slow atomic beams, laser cooling and spontaneous light force traps.

Ketterle co-invented the Dark SPOT trap and combined laser cooling and evaporative cooling, which became key techniques to obtain Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute atomic gases.

Besides his Nobel, Ketterle has won numerous other awards for his work, including the Gustav-Hertz Prize of the German physical society in 1997, the Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics in 1999 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics in 2000.