Annual Smith Lecture

May 7, 2002, at 8:00 p.m.
131 Hitchcock Hall

Stone Cold Science: Bose-Einstein Condensation and the Weird World of Physics a Millionth of a Degree from Absolute Zero

Professor Eric Cornell

The University of Colorado

As atoms get colder, they behave more like waves and less like particles. When a gas of atoms gets so cold that the "waviness" of one atom overlaps the waviness of another, the result is a sort of quantum mechanical identity crisis, a "condensation" predicted 70 years ago by Albert Einstein and S. N. Bose.Dr. Cornell will discuss how to reach the necessary record-low temperature, and explain why he goes to all the trouble to create this bizarre state of matter.

Professor Eric Cornell received his B.S. in 1985 from Stanford and his Ph.D. in 1990 from M.I.T. Since 1992 he has been a staff scientist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He is a Fellow of JILA and Professor Adjoint in the Physics Department of the University of Colorado, Boulder. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics with Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle.