During this time, he developed the concept of evaporative cooling as a means to achieve BEC, which was a significant contribution to the field and ultimately led to the awarding of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics.
During his time there, he designed and developed a range of low-temperature scanning probe microscopes to visualize various physics phenomena, including vortices in superconductors.
After 1997, he spent eight years in industry at KLA-Tencor, where he focused on developing advanced equipment for the production and inspection of hard disk drives and semiconductors.
In 2005, he and his colleague Eric Betzig discovered photoactivatable fluorescent proteins and invented PALM (photoactivated localization microscopy), which enabled the visualization of cell structures beyond the diffraction limit.
The PALM was constructed in a La Jolla condominium,[6] underwent testing at the National Institute of Health, and contributed to the awarding of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.