Nobel prize winning physicist and University of Colorado at Boulder adjoint Professor Eric Cornell will offer a layman's explanation of his work with super-cooled atoms and new states of condensed matter at a free public lecture July 22.
"Stone Cold Science: Things Get Weird Around Absolute Zero" will begin at 7:30 p.m. in room G1B20 of the Duane Physics Building on the CU-Boulder campus.
Cornell is a senior scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, and an adjoint professor in the CU-Boulder physics department. In 2001, he and CU-Boulder colleague Carl Wieman received the Nobel Prize in physics for creating a Bose-Einstein condensate, a new form of matter.
Albert Einstein predicted the existence of the condensate about 80 years ago, theorizing that when atoms get cold enough, they undergo a sort of quantum identity crisis and form a "superatom."
In his lecture, Cornell will explain how scientists achieve the necessary record-low temperatures to create a Bose-Einstein condensate and why scientists are trying to learn about this bizarre state of matter. The presentation will last about an hour and will include time for questions from the audience.
The lecture is part of the fifth annual Boulder Summer School for Condensed Matter and Material Physics, which is hosted by CU-Boulder and supported by the university, NIST and a $780,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The school's goal is to enable graduate and postdoctoral students from around the world to work at the frontiers of science and technology by exposing them to a broad range of concepts, techniques and applications, according to co-founder and CU-Boulder physics Professor Leo Radzihovsky.
For more information about the July 22 lecture, call (303) 735-2527.