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Tuesday, February 18, 2014
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Physics Auditorium, TA-3 Bldg 215

Seminar

Almost Absolute Zero: the story of laser cooling and trapping

William Phillips
National Institute of Standards and Technology

Contrary to intuition, we can cool a gas by shining a laser on it. This lecture will describe how laser cooling works, and how this process has allowed us to reach temperatures less than a microdegree above absolute zero--millions of times colder than the darkest regions of outer space. Atomic clocks using these ultra-cold atoms now have an accuracy better that one second in 300 million years, and new states of matter arising from sub-microdegree gases are opening avenues of research undreamt of in the 20th century.

Host: Bob Ecke