William Daniel 'Bill' Phillips (born 1948), US physicist. Phillips is best known for his work on laser cooling, a technique to slow the movement of gaseous atoms in order to better study them. For this work, he was awarded a share of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics (together with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Steven Chu). Phillips is a physicist at the National Insitute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He joined NIST in 1978 when it was known as the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), carrying out his work in the 1980s and 1990s at the Gaithersburg site, Maryland, USA. Photographed in 1998.