The Tsinghua University Center for Advanced Study and the Department of Physics are jointly hosting a most important international conference from October 20 to 24 on the physics of ultra-cold atoms. The title theme of the Conference is “Frontiers of Degenerate Quantum Gases”. The International Organizing Committee for the Conference includes Nobel laureates Chen-Ning Yang (Tsinghua, China), William Phillips (NIST, USA), Anthony Legett (UI/IC, USA), and Chinese-American Physicists Deborah Shiu-Lan Jin (JILA, USA) and Tin-Lun Ho (Ohio State, USA).
Steven Chu (USA), Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (France) and William Phillips (USA) jointly received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for their innovations in developing successfully a technique for trapping atoms at ultra-low temperatures by using lasers. This technique opened new research frontiers in the quantum physical properties of matter at temperatures close to absolute zero (- 273.15 C). Making use of these new techniques, Wolfgang Ketterle of MIT and Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman of JILA-Colorado successfully produced the Bose-Einstein Condensate in 1995. They were jointly awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Indian physicist S.N. Bose and Albert Einstein first predicted the Bose-Einstein Condensate state--a totally degenerate quantum state at temperatures close to zero--on the basis of quantum statistics more than 80 years ago.
With new techniques for achieving ever lower temperatures, physicists from many countries, including China, hastened to study the new physics of Bose-Einstein condensates. Their research led to the study of degenerate quantum Bose gases and degenerate quantum Fermi gases. The study of degenerate quantum gases developed into one of the hottest new frontiers in physics. The worldwide interest in ultra-cold atoms is due in part to the numerous quantum phenomena that have emerged from this research in the last decade. The new discoveries include such phenomena as the interference of matter waves, superconductor-like properties, and ideal-fluid behavior. Research into ultra-cold atoms, it is also believed, may one day lead to such useful applications as high-precision measurements, new materials design, and quantum information processing.
More than 200 registered participants, mostly from abroad, have gathered at Tsinghua for the Conference. The most active experimental groups and more than thirty of the world’s top researchers in cold-atom physics will report their latest experimental and theoretical findings over the next few days. They will discuss, among other topics, the unusual superfluid properties of strongly acting ultra-cold atoms, the prospects for simulating solid-state systems using cold atoms, and a number of other new exciting discoveries. Four Nobel laureates will be among the top physicists reporting at the Conference. They are Chen-Ning Yang, William Phillips, Wolfgang Ketterle, and Eric Cornell. MacArthur Prize and Franklin Medal winner Deborah Jin and 2008 Onsaga Prize winners Gordon Baym and Tin-Lun Ho are also on hand to report their latest research results. Peter Zoller, Immanuel Bloch and Randy Hulet are world-famous physicists who are also scheduled to report their latest findings.
As early as 1957, immediately after their Nobel Prize winning work on parity violation, C.N. Yang and T.D. Lee, in collaboration with Kerson Huang, studied the influence of boson-boson collisions on the properties of Bose-Einstein condensates and calculated the modifications to some of the important physical parameters. The experimental verification of these theoretical results will be reported at the Conference. Verification of the theoretical results of the collaboration carried out by C.N. Yang and C.P. Yang in 1969 on the thermodynamics of one-dimensional Boson systems will also be reported.
Since 1999, the faculty and students in the Center for Advanced Study have actively pursued theoretical studies of Bose-Einstein condensation. Their results have been published in leading physics journals. The Center collaborates closely with many of the world’s top theorists in cold-atom physics. The Center also has sponsored two well attended workshops on ultra-cold atoms physics, one in December 2006 and another in 2007. The Center’s Professor Tin-Lun Ho organized both workshops with top theorists as lecturers.
Currently, several groups in China actively pursue the study of ultra-cold atom physics. This Tsinghua Conference brings to Tsinghua many of the world’s top scholars in the area of ultra-cold atoms physics. They bring to the Chinese physics community the latest findings and thinking on the subject. One of the aims of the Conference is to stimulate further research efforts in this exciting frontier of physics in China.
(Photo by Guo Haijun)
