NEWS RELEASE

2/4/02

Dawn Levy, News Service (650) 725-1944; e-mail: dawnlevy@stanford.edu

2001 Physics Nobel laureate to give Hofstadter lecture

Nobel Prize winner Eric A. Cornell will deliver this year's Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lecture at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 14, in the Teaching Center at the Science and Engineering Quad. The talk is titled "Stone Cold Science: Bose-Einstein Condensation and the Weird World of Physics a Millionth of a Degree from Absolute Zero." A more technically oriented colloquium will take place at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 13, in the same location.

"If you get atoms cold enough, they start less and less to act like little billiard balls and more like waves," says Cornell, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics for the formation of Bose-Einstein condensate with Carl E. Wieman of the University of Colorado-Boulder and Wolfgang Ketterle of MIT.

Cornell is a senior scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He and Wiemann are both with JILA, formerly called the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics.

Bose-Einstein condensate is a state of matter where thousands of individual atoms in a gas start to behave like one big "superatom." Atoms lose their particle nature and become like one giant wave.

Predicted in 1924 by Albert Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, Bose-Einstein condensate took more than 70 years to create. To achieve this new state of matter, a gas must be cooled below 20 billionth of a degree above absolute zero. In 1995, a combination of laser and magnetic traps let Cornell and Wieman cool rubidium atoms to the lowest temperature ever, setting the stage for formation of the first Bose-Einstein condensate.

Atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate display atomic properties not seen anywhere else. For physicists, the condensate represents a fascinating workshop for studying quantum mechanics. "It is a system in which quantum mechanics have been magnified to expand over your entire sample as opposed to just a very tiny distance," Cornell says.

In his public lecture on Feb. 14, Cornell will illustrate why it was so difficult to produce this weird state of matter for the first time. In his technical colloquium on Feb. 13, he will talk about the effects of rotation on the condensate. Unlike water in an ordinary glass, a Bose-Einstein condensate when swirled produces hundreds of little tornado-like vortices.

The lecture honors Nobel Prize winner Robert Hofstadter, who served on Stanford's physics faculty from 1950 until his death in 1990. A Stanford alumnus, Cornell says he is pleased to give this lecture in memory of one of Stanford's distinguished physics professors. For Cornell, who received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1985, the excellent undergraduate education at Stanford ­ both in the classroom and in the laboratory ­ launched him into a career in research.

"The time at Stanford was really fundamental," says Cornell. He spent undergraduate summers working with researchers including Blas Cabrera, John Turneaure and C. W. Francis Everitt on the still ongoing general relativity gyroscope experiment and on projects measuring ultra-low magnetic fields. "This undergraduate research work really sparked my interest in doing a career in the area of low-temperature physics," Cornell says.

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By Christian Heuss