"Creating a New Form of Matter at the Coldest Temperature in the Universe"

Wieman is a member of the physics faculty at the University of Colorado and a fellow of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder. He is a native of Corvallis and a graduate of Corvallis High School. He received his physics degrees at MIT and Stanford. His work has been recognized with a number of awards, including the Lawrence Prize of the U.S. Department of Energy and the Davisson-Germer Award in Atomic Physics of the American Physical Society. Wieman's research is based on a 1924 prediction by Albert Einstein that a new form of matter, called the Bose-Einstein condensation, would result if a gas were cooled to extremely low temperatures. In 1995, Wieman's research group became the first to observe this condensation by cooling a collection of atoms to within one millionth of a degree above absolute zero. The talk will discuss the techniques used to cool atoms to low temperatures and the unusual properties of this new form of matter.