Lab Home | Phone | Search
Center for Nonlinear Studies  Center for Nonlinear Studies
 Home 
▶ People 
 CNLS Staff Members 
 Executive Committee 
 Postdocs 
 Visitors 
 Students 
 Research 
 Publications 
▶ Conferences 
 Workshops 
 Sponsorship 
▶ Talks 
 Seminars 
 Postdoc Seminars Archive 
 Quantum Lunch 
 Quantum Lunch Archive 
 P/T Colloquia 
 Archive 
 Ulam Scholar 
 Anastasio Fellow 
 Fellow Program 
 
▶ Student Requests      
 Student Program 
▶ Visitor Requests 
 Description 
 Past Visitors 
▶ Services 
 General 
 
 History of CNLS 
 
 Maps, Directions 
 T-Division 
 LANL 
 
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