The 2007 Scott Lectures in the Department of Physics will be presented this week by Nobel Prize winner Professor William Phillips, from the National Institute of Standards, USA.
The 2007 Scott Lectures in the Department of Physics will be presented this week by Nobel Prize winner Professor William Phillips, from the National Institute of Standards, USA.
In his lectures, which begin tonight, Professor Phillips will discuss his own work and the resulting achievements and discoveries in atomic physics.
Through the three lectures, Professor Phillips will describe how laser cooling of atoms works and the amazing properties that these atoms exhibit. He will then explain how this lead to the experimental realisation of the Bose-Einstein complex; for which three other researchers won a Nobel Prize.
Professor Phillips was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 along with Professor Steven Chu, Stanford University, USA, and Professor Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Collège de France and École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France, "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”. Their work enables scientists to slow the movement of gaseous atoms opening a new and exciting field in physics.
The Scott Lectures:
Monday, March 5: “Almost Absolute Zero:the story of laser cooling and trapping”
Wednesday, March 7: “Optics with laser-like atom waves”
Friday, March 9: “A Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice: cold atomic gases meet solid state physics”
The Scott lectures have been running for over 70 years, following a bequest in 1927 from Professor A.W. Scott of St David's College, Lampeter; now University of Wales Lampeter. The short series of lectures are aimed to advance the physical sciences, and presented each year at the Department of Physics.
The lectures are open to the public and will start at 4.15pm on each day. They will held in the Pippard lecture theatre, Department of Physics, Cavendish Laboratory, JJ Thompson Avenue. Refreshments will be served after Monday's lecture in the Pippard lecture theatre foyer.
For more information contact Leona Hope on 01223 337429 or lh294@cam.ac.uk
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