Spring Break
Nobel prize winner to speak on campus
Ben Koerselman
William D. Phillips, who shared the Noble prize for physics in 1997, will deliver a free lecture at 7:30 p.m. tonight in the Lory Student Center Theatre. Phillips' lecture, entitled "Almost Absolute Zero: The Story of Laser Cooling and Trapping," will be adapted from his Noble address but is intended for general audiences.
According to physics professor Mark Bradley, Phillips will be using a multimedia presentation to help demonstrate the different experiments he conducted in laser cooling and atom capturing.
Phillips, along with fellow physicists Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, won the prize for demonstrating a way to use lasers to successfully trap atoms and cool them to within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero.
"Cold has been done, but what Phillips and the two other scientists achieved was colder than has ever been accomplished before," Bradley Said.
Absolute zero, according to phy-sics professor Bill Fairbank [spelled correctly], is around minus 273 degrees Celsius, roughly 77 degrees Celsius colder than liquid nitrogen. At this frigid temperature "atoms are moving as slowly as they possibly can," Bradley said.
"Atoms this cold exhibit weird and wonderful properties and are being used for applications ranging from super-accurate atomic clocks to new quantum devices like atom lasers," Phillips said in a press release for the event. Phillips is delivering the Frank L. Galeener Memorial Lecture, a lecture held bi-annually since 1995 in honor of Galeener, a professor of physics at Colorado State Univers-ity, who died in 1993.
"It's not very often that you get a Noble prize winner to speak, and (Phillips) is supposed to be a very good public speaker," Bradley said. "I think it will be an exciting talk."
Fairbank agreed: "This talk is meant to be on a level that the general public can appreciate. I'm brin-ging my children to it."
