Carl Wieman
Nobel Laureate
Distinguished Professor of Physics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO

Talk Title: Bose-Einstein Condensation: Quantum weirdness at the lowest temperature in the universe

Abstract
In 1924 Einstein predicted that a gas would undergo a dramatic transformation at a sufficiently low temperature (now known as Bose-Einstein condensation or BEC). In 1995, my group was able to observe this transformation by cooling a gas sample to the unprecedented temperature of less than 100 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. The BEC state is a novel form of matter in which a large number of atoms lose their individual identities and behave as a single quantum entity, the "superatom". This entity is the atom analogue to laser light, and, although large enough to be easily seen and manipulated, exhibits the nonintuitive quantum behavior normally important only at much tinier size scales. The study and use of the curious properties of BEC has now become an important subfield of physics. I will discuss how we create BEC and some of the subsequent research we have done on it. Interactive applets as a tool for teaching science will be demonstrated in the presentation.

Biographical Sketch
Carl Wieman grew up in the forests of Oregon and received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1977. He has been at the University of Colorado since 1984 where he is currently a Distinguished Professor of Physics and a Fellow of JILA. He has carried out research in a variety of areas of laser spectroscopy, including using laser light to cool atoms. This led to cooling atoms sufficiently to attain Bose-Einstein condensation in a vapor, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, as well as numerous other awards. He has worked on a variety of innovations in teaching physics to a broad range of students, including the Physics Education Technology Project, which creates online interactive simulations for learning physics (http://www.colorado.edu/physics/phet) . He is a 2001 recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Distinguished Teaching Scholar Award and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Board of Physics and Astronomy, the Committee on Undergraduate Science Education and the National Task Force on Undergraduate Physics. He has also been nominated as Chair of the Board on Science Education at the National Academies.