One Year Ago Tomorrow (and What Physics Students Should Know About It)

Promotional image for talk: Elements of a successful scientific talk

Speaker(s): Wes Campbell

The 2013 Nobel Prize in physics is announced today, but for a series of practical reasons, today’s discussion will focus on the work that led to the prize that was awarded to David Wineland and Serge Haroche one year ago tomorrow. That story begins with the demonstration of laser cooling in 1978, which ushered in a new era for atomic physics where the full quantum states (internal and external) of atoms would be precisely controlled in the following decades. This control has essentially given today’s atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physicist the power to realize experiments in the laboratory that were always considered “gedanken-” or thought- experiments. The simplistic nature of these experiments means they can be understood with undergraduate-level concepts, and the field of AMO physics will be introduced through a case study of work by Wineland and Haroche.

Colloquium

Junior and senior physics majors attend our biweekly colloquium series, held on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 p.m. in Shanahan B460. The talks are open to all students and to the public, and are frequently attended by scientists from the other Claremont Colleges, Cal Poly Pomona, and others. The series features speakers from a broad range of institutions and fields of physics.