Whitfield Lecture in Physics Set for 12 April 2007

3 April 2007—Randall Hulet, the Fayez Sarofim Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University, will present the George Whitfield Lecture in Physics on 12 April 2007 at the Penn State University Park campus. The lecture, titled "Fermion Pairing with Ultracold Atoms" will take place at 4:00 p.m. in 117 Osmond Laboratory, and will be preceeded by refreshments at 3:30 p.m. in the Davey Laboratory/Osmond Laboratory overpass. The free public lecture is sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.

Hulet's research focuses on the field of ultra-low-temperature atomic gases. His group was one of the first three groups to achieve Bose-Einstein condensation of an atomic gas in 1995. His current interest is the application of atomic gases, composed of the subatomic particles called fermions, for simulating fundamental models of condensed-matter physics.

"Ultracold atomic fermions have the potential for simulating important, and in some cases unsolved, models of condensed-matter physics," says Hulet. "In addition to being clean and well-characterized, the physical parameters of ultracold atomic gases are readily tunable." He will discuss experiments on the pairing of Lithium 6 (6Li), a fermion, where a magnetically-tuned collision resonance, known as Feshbach resonance, enables the transformation of a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) to a gas of Cooper pairs known as a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid. He also will discuss the experimental exploration of the phase diagram of certain kinds of Fermi gases with unequal spin populations.

Hulet's work has been recognized with a NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 2004, the I.I. Rabi Prize of the American Physical Society in 1995, a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1989, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 1988. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society.

Hulet joined the faculty of Rice University in 1987 as an assistant professor of physics. He was promoted to associate professor in 1992 and to professor in 1996, and was named the Fayez Sarofim Professor of Physics and Astronomy in 2000. Prior to joining the faculty at Rice University, he was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology from 1985 to 1987. He also was a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1984 to 1985. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics at Stanford University in 1978 and a doctoral degree in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984.

For more information, call the Sherri Taylor in the Department of Physics at 814-863-9759.

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