Thomas G. Phillips

After completing his doctorate at Oxford University in 1964, Phillips was a research associate at Stanford University for one year.[2] He returned to Oxford, serving as a lecturer for two years.[4]

In 1968, Phiilips moved to Bell Labs, where he worked down the hallway from Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. After Phillips attended a talk by Penzias about the recent (1970) detection of CO in the Orion Nebula, Penzias challenged Phillips to build a more sensitive receiver for millimeter astronomy.[5] Phillips set about doing so, and in 1973 he made the first Indium Antimonide (InSb) hot electron bolometer heterodyne receiver used for astronomical observations.[6][7] The receiver had a noise temperature three times lower than the Schottky diode receivers Wilson and Penzias had used to detect CO,[8] and because the receiver also required less local oscillator power, it held the potential to be usable at higher frequencies.[5] A few years later, Phillips was able to get the receiver to operate at 346 GHz, in the submillimeter wavelength regime. Because no radio telescopes could operate at such a high frequency, he used it on the Hale Telescope, an optical telescope with a surface accuracy more than sufficient for submillimeter observations.[9] By 1980, Phillips' InSb receiver could operate at 492 GHz, and with it mounted on the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, the ³P₁—³P₀ fine structure line of neutral atomic carbon was detected in the interstellar medium.[10]

Phillips arrived at Caltech in 1978, as a visiting associate. He joined Caltech's faculty as a professor of physics in 1979.[2]

By the late 1970s, Phillips had begun exploring a new receiver technology, the SIS receiver, whose optimization would occupy him for the next few decades.[11][5] In this same time period, Caltech was building a millimeter-wave interferometer at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO), consisting of three (initially - later six) Leighton antennas. Phillips was made the director of OVRO during the period that the interferometer was made operational.[5][3]

The OVRO site was not good enough to allow submillimeter observations most of the time, so in 1980, Phillips began the process of getting permits and funding to move a Leighton antenna to Mauna Kea, a site high enough to allow submillimeter work.[3] As a result, the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory was constructed on Mauna Kea, and Phillips served as its first director.

Phillips spent decades working with NASA to launch a space-based submillimeter observatory.[5] Eventually US and European efforts to produce such an instrument were merged, and Phillips became the co-Principal Investigator for the HIFI receiver on the Herschel Space Observatory.[12]

• 1975 - Fellow of American Physical Society (APS)[13]
• 2004 - Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation[14]
• 2010 - NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal[2]
• 2014 - Doctor Honoris Causa from Paris Observatory[15]