GREENSBORO, N.C. - The department of physics at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University will host a Colloquium and Nobel Lecture on Monday, March 3. The title of the discussion is “Bose-Einstein condensation, quantum weirdness at the lowest temperature in the universe.”
The colloquium will be held 3:30-5 p.m. in Marteena Hall, room 312, followed by a public lecture in Stallings Ballroom, Memorial Union, at 7 p.m.

The guest lecturer is Dr. Carl Edwin Wieman, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics. Wieman is Distinguished Professor of Physics and JILA (Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) Fellow at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is the author of over 150 scientific articles in internationally recognized journals and he holds three patents. He earned a B.S. from MIT, a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a Doctorate of Science from the University of Chicago.

In 1924, Albert Einstein predicted that a gas would undergo a dramatic transformation at a sufficiently low temperature, now known as Bose-Einstein condensation or BEC. In 1995, Weiman’s research group at JILA/University of Colorado was able to observe this transformation by cooling a gas sample to the unprecedented temperature of less than 100 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. During the A&T lecture, Wieman will discuss how the Wieman Group creates BEC and some of the group’s subsequent research.

For further details about the colloquium and lecture, contact Dr. Solomon Bililign, chair of the physics department, at (336) 334-7646 or bililign@ncat.edu.