GENESEO, N.Y. – The 2001 Nobel Laureate in physics, Wolfgang Ketterle, will deliver the 2016 Robert “Duke” Sells lecture in physics Jan. 27 at 7 p.m. in Newton Hall Room 202.
Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will address “The Coolest Use of Light – How to Make the Coldest Matter in the Universe.” The lecture is free and open to the public.
As part of his visit to Geneseo, Dr. Ketterle will meet informally with students and faculty and will also deliver a special physics colloquium on his latest research.
“We are extremely excited to have such a high-profile physicist coming to Geneseo,” said Charles Freeman, professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “Dr. Ketterle is one of the world’s leading scientists, and he is a very enthusiastic and energetic speaker. Our students are buzzing with excitement to have the opportunity to meet a Nobel Laureate in person.”
Ketterle earned a doctorate in Physics from the University of Munich. After postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, the University of Heidelberg and at MIT, he joined the physics faculty at MIT in 1993. He does experimental research in atomic physics and laser spectroscopy and focuses currently on Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute atomic gases. He was among the first scientists to observe this phenomenon in 1995, and realized the first atom laser in 1997. His earlier research was in molecular spectroscopy and combustion diagnostics.
His awards include a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship (1996), the Rabi Prize of the American Physical Society (1997), the Gustav-Hertz Prize of the German Physical Society (1997), the Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation (1998), the Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics (1999), the Dannie-Heineman Prize of the Academy of Sciences, Göttingen, Germany (1999), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics (2000), and the Nobel Prize in Physics (2001, together with E.A. Cornell and C.E. Wieman).
The “Sells” lecture is named in honor of the late Robert “Duke” Sells, who founded the physics department at SUNY Geneseo back in 1963.
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