[Note: High resolution photos are available of Smoot and Wieman.]
In the space of only five weeks, three Nobel Prize winning physicists will visit the Vanderbilt campus and provide local researchers with updates on the latest developments in fields ranging from cosmology to the behavior of atoms to science education. Two of the three will also give free public lectures while they are here.
The first laureate visiting the campus is William D. Phillips, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery that laser beams could be used to create “optical traps” that cool the atoms in gases down to temperatures near absolute zero, slowing them down enough to make them much easier to study. He will be giving a technical talk at 10 a.m. on Friday, March 7.
The second prize winner will be George F. Smoot from the University of California, Berkeley, who shared a Nobel Prize in 2006 for the discovery of variations in fossil radiation from the birth of the universe, called the cosmic background radiation (CBR), that have provided important clues into the structure of the universe shortly after the Big Bang. He will give a free public lecture on the latest studies of the CBR on Thursday afternoon, March 20.
The final Nobelist scheduled for a visit is Carl E. Wieman from the University of Colorado, Boulder, who received the prize in 2001 for the creation of a new state of matter, called the Bose-Einstein condensate that exists at ultra-low temperatures. He and his collaborators used Phillips’ optical trap techniques to create this dilute gas of alkali atoms that acts like a “super atom.” On Monday afternoon, April 7, he will give a free public lecture titled “Science Education in the 21st Century: Using the tools of physics to teach physics.”
More information about the distinguished visitors is available on the physics department’s home page at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/physics/home.
For more news about Vanderbilt, visit the News Service homepage at www.vanderbilt.edu/News.
Media Contact: David F. Salisbury, (615) 322-NEWS
david.salisbury@vanderbilt.edu