Physicist Jun Ye Awarded 2026 Wolf Prize in Physics
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The National Institute of Standards and Technology announced that physicist Jun Ye of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology has been awarded the 2026 Wolf Prize in Physics. The award cited Ye’s achievement in transformative, widely applicable advances in the control of ultracold atomic systems. Ye shares the prize with Immanuel Bloch, scientific director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. The two will split the $100,000 award.
Ye said he was honored and humbled and expressed sincere gratitude to the Wolf Prize Committee. He thanked his mentors, colleagues, students and postdocs for their contributions.
Ye pioneered the development of the world’s most accurate and stable optical atomic clocks, achieving unprecedented precision. He and his collaborators used ultrastable lasers and precise control of the interactions between laser‑trapped atoms to reach record‑breaking results. These clocks are paving the way to redefine the international standard for time and frequency measurements.
His research has opened new possibilities for tests of fundamental physics, including the most sensitive search for the electron’s electric dipole moment, relativistic geodesy, and searches for variations in fundamental constants.
Ye was born in Shanghai in 1967. He often stayed with his paternal grandmother while his parents pursued demanding careers. His grandmother could neither read nor write, but she gave him a bundle of pencils and a stack of paper, advising him to write down or draw anything that interested him. During his freshman year in high school, a physics teacher noticed his aptitude for science and encouraged him to enter a physics competition, which he won. He earned a physics degree at Shanghai Jiao‑Tong University and immigrated to the United States in 1989.
He joined JILA in 1992, studying under NIST physicist John Hall. Ye is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2022 he shared the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for his work on atomic clocks, received the Vannevar Bush Fellowship, the Herbert Walther Award and the Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honour.
The Wolf Prize is an international award granted in Israel, presented most years since 1978 to living scientists and artists for achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations among people irrespective of nationality, race, colour, religion, sex or political views.
