Maurer Distinguished Lecture Series Brings Renowned Physicist to Campus Tonight

Photo Submitted

Deborah Jin

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The 2013 Maurer Distinguished Lecture will be held at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 18, in Hillside Auditorium. Deborah Jin, a prize-winning experimental physicist and University of Colorado professor, will serve as this year’s lecturer and will speak on “Fun With Ultracold Atoms.” Jin will share her work exploring quantum behavior in gases of atoms and molecules cooled to temperatures near absolute zero.

A graduate of Princeton University and the University of Chicago, Jin completed her postdoctoral research at JILA (formerly the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics), a joint institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and was added to the faculty as an adjoint professor of physics in 1997. She has participated and led research teams in multiple studies that have been nationally recognized for their contributions to the field of physics.

Her postdoctoral research at JILA involved some of the early experiments on Bose-Einstein condensates. She has also conducted research on ultracold gases of fermions, a class of particles that cannot share the same quantum state. Her research group’s success in cooling a gas of fermions to less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero was an accomplishment that Science magazine recognized as a “Science Breakthrough of the Year” in 1999.

Jin’s research accomplishments in discovering the similarities between fermionic condensation and superconductivity led Scientific American to recognize her as the magazine’s 2004 Research Leader of the Year. She and her research team hope to use their current discoveries about new states of matter to devise models that will help explain the complex quantum systems we experience in normal life.

Jin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her other honors include the American Physical Society’s Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award, NIST’s Samuel Wesley Stratton Award, the Franklin Institute’s 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, the Service to America Medal, the 2009 William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship.

The Maurer Distinguished Lecture Series began in 1995 in honor of Robert D. Maurer, distinguished alumni of the department of physics. A native of Arkadelphia, Maurer received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Arkansas and his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He went on to become a senior research fellow at Corning Glass Works in Corning, New York, where his work with optical fibers is still revolutionizing the communications industry. He received an honorary LL.D. degree from the University of Arkansas in 1980.