Smith Lecture, Thursday, May 4, 2006

When freezing cold is not cold enough --- new forms of matter close to absolute zero temperature

Wolfgang Ketterle

John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics Research Laboratory for Electronics, MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, and Department of Physics

2001 Nobel Laureate in Physics

Why do physicists freeze matter to extremely low temperatures? Why is it worthwhile to cool to temperatures which are more than a million times lower than that of interstellar space? This lecture will discuss new forms of matter, which only exist at extremely low temperatures. Low temperatures open a new door to the quantum world where particles behave as waves and "march in lockstep". In 1925, Einstein predicted such a new form of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate, but it was realized only in 1995 in laboratories at Boulder and at MIT. More recently, Bose-Einstein condensates of molecules and fermion pairs have been created and show behavior similar to electrons in superconducting materials.

8:00 p.m., 131 Hitchcock Hall Auditorium