The Yale Physics 2019 Beatrice Tinsley Prize Lecture, hosted by the Yale Society of Physics Students, Women in Physics, and selected Astronomy majors, will be given on December 5th by Wolfgang Ketterle, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Physics and Professor at MIT.
Thursday, December 5, 2019 - Ultracold atoms: From superfluid gases to spin transport
The realization of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute atomic gases has created a unique experimental platform to study superfluidity in Bose and Fermi gases. The low density (a million times lower than air) of the gas allows control over the atoms and their interactions using the tools and precision of atomic physics. For fermions, the crossover from Bose-Einstein condensation of strongly bound fermion pairs to weakly bound Cooper pairs has been explored. After freezing out the motion of atoms, control of the spin degree of freedom has emerged as a new frontier. I will report on recent results on spin transport in optical lattices which highlights the crucial role of the anisotropy in the paradigmatic Heisenberg Hamiltonian. These studies illustrate a new approach to condensed-matter physics where many-body phenomena are realized in dilute atomic gases.
The Beatrice Tinsley Prize Lecture is given each year by a distinguished physicist in honor of Beatrice Muriel Hill Tinsley, the first female professor of astronomy at Yale, where she worked from 1974 until her death in 1981. Her work on disk galaxies has proven foundational in the decades following her passing. In 2016, the Yale Society of Physics Students inaugurated the Beatrice Tinsley Prize Lecture, which saw the invitation of Asimina Arvanitaki. This prize was started to honor Tinsley’s myriad contributions and to encourage collaboration and contact between distinguished physicists and the Yale undergraduate physics community. The speaker is jointly invited and hosted by the Society of Physics Students, Women in Physics, and undergraduate students from Astronomy.