Almost Absolute Zero: The Story of Laser Cooling & Trapping
Oct 21, 2003
7:30PM to 8:30PM
Date/Time
Date(s) - 21/10/2003
7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Title: Almost Absolute Zero: The Story of Laser Cooling & Trapping
Speaker: Dr. Bill Phillips
Institute: NIST
Laser Cooling & Trapping Group
Physics Laboratory
Location: UH
Description:
Contrary to intuition, we can cool down a gas by shining a laser on it. This lecture will describe how laser cooling works, and why it works better than anyone had expected it to. We can now cool a gas of atoms to less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero – the coldest temperatures in the universe. Atoms this cold exhibit weird and wonderful properties and are being used for applications ranging from super-accurate atomic clocks to new quantum devices like atom lasers. The lecture is an updated version of the Nobel Lecture given in Stockholm on 8 December 1997. It is aimed at a general audience of non-scientists, but discusses some of the newest and most exciting developments in physics.