NOBEL PHYSICIST TO DELIVER 2002 MAURER LECTURE

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Nobel Laureate Steven Chu will speak on "Laser Cooling and Trapping: From Atomic clocks to Watching Biomolecules One at a Time" as the 2002 Robert D. Maurer Lecturer. The lecture series, sponsored by the physics department in Fulbright College and the Arkansas Space Grant Consortium, is named after alumnus Dr. Robert D. Maurer, co-inventor of the first telecommunications grade optical fiber.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held Thursday, March 28 in Giffels Auditorium, Old Main at 7:30 p.m. A reception will follow.

Professor Chu will discuss how atoms can be cooled with lasers to temperatures of 200 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Once chilled, the atoms can then be held and manipulated with light. This new technology has made possible the construction of ultra-precise atomic clocks, atom interferometers, and the achievement of "Bose condensate," which is a new state of matter. The same technique has allowed scientists to study the behavior of individual bio-molecules and bio-molecular systems in real time.

On Friday, March 29, Professor Chu will offer a colloquium on "Biology at the Single Molecule Level" at 4 p.m. in the Paul Sharrah Lecture Hall, physics building 133. He will discuss how the ability to look at individual molecules has given researchers new insights into biological processes. For example, studies of polymers using DNA have fundamentally altered current thinking of polymer dynamics by showing that identical molecules placed under identical conditions take several distinct paths to a new equilibrium state.

Steven Chu, the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University, received his Ph.D. in 1976 from the University of California at Berkeley. After two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley, he joined the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1978, where he served as Head of the Quantum Electronics Department from 1983 to 1987. In 1987, he joined Stanford University.

Professor Chu's research is primarily in atomic physics, quantum electronics, and bio-physics. He has published over 130 scientific papers. In his postdoctoral work at Berkeley, he made one of the earliest atomic physics confirmations of the Weinberg-Salam-Glashow theory that unifies weak and electromagnetic forces.

In 1985, he led the group that demonstrated how to first cool and then trap atoms with light. The optical trap was also used to trap microscopic particles in water. These so-called "optical tweezers" are widely used in biology today. During research he conducted at Stanford, Chu explained how multi-level atoms can be cooled far below the minimum temperature predicted by the theory of two-level atoms.

Using the optical tweezers, Chu developed methods to simultaneously visualize and manipulate single bio-molecules. Using this new technique, his research group has used single DNA molecules to address a number of problems in polymer science.

Chu has been awarded the Herbert Broida Prize for Spectroscopy by the American Physical Society, was named the co-winner of the King Faisal International Prize for Science in 1993, and won the Arthur Schawlow Prize for Laser Science in 1994. In 1997, he was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. He is also the recipient of the Humboldt Senior Scientist Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academica Sinica, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Korean Academy of Science and Engineering.