TORONTO, January 28, 2002 -- Joint winner of the Nobel Prize in physics Wolfgang Ketterle will be at York University on Tuesday, Feb. 5, hosted by York's department of physics and astronomy.
Ketterle, Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman were the first scientists to discover a new state of matter called the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), more than 70 years after it was first theorized by Einstein and the Indian physicist Bose. They received the Nobel Prize for 2001.
"Their discovery has made it possible to study physics at the quantum level in a very pure way that was not possible before," says York Prof. Roman Koniuk, noting that all advances in modern electronics depend on a precise understanding of quantum mechanical behaviour. Creation of the BEC is expected to lead to improvements in atomic clocks and other precision measuring devices, and to revolutionary advances in nanotechnology where atoms can be manipulated in new ways.
Prof. Kumar, a member of the York University quantum optics research group, plans to advance his work in the area of atom trapping using techniques developed in BEC experiments. Scientists have long sought to make matter behave in the same, controlled way as light particles (or photons) in a laser, which all have the same energy and oscillate together. Bose calculated the equations that describe the behaviour of a class of particles, which include photons. Einstein extended the Bose theory to particles with mass, predicting that if a gas of certain atoms were cooled to a very low temperature all the atoms would suddenly gather in the lowest possible energy state and behave collectively.
"Ketterle has used lasers to cool atoms in an atom trap to a temperature of less than one microkelvin ( l millionth of a kelvin; 0 kelvin = minus 273.15 Celsius) and created a Bose condensate. His work has shown that these atoms behave collectively and obey theoretical predictions," said Kumar. "By extracting the Bose condensed atoms from the trap and studying them, he has been able to verify that the atoms behave coherently, thus demonstrating the basis for an atom laser." While Cornell and Wieman used rubidium atoms to produce the Bose-Einstein condensate, Ketterle worked independently using sodium atoms. They made their discoveries in 1995.
Wolfgang Ketterle was born in 1957 in Heidelberg, Germany. He received his PhD in 1986 and is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He will speak at 4 p.m. in lecture hall B in the new Computer Science Building at York University, Keele Campus, 4700 Keele St.
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For further information, please contact:
| Prof. Roman Koniuk | Prof. Kumar | Susan Bigelow |
| Faculty of Pure and Applied Science | Faculty of Pure and Applied Science | Media Relations |
| York University | York University | York University |
| 416-736-2100, ext. 66480 | 416-736-2100, ext. 77755 | 416-736-2100, ext. 22091 |
| koniuk@yorku.ca | akumar@yorku.ca | sbigelow@yorku.ca |
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