Moses Chan, Evan Pugh professor of physics, will present a free public lecture, "Einstein's Legacy in Low-Temperature Physics: Bizarre Behavior of Gas, Liquid and Solid Matter Near Absolute Zero," from 11 a.m. to about 12:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 19, in 100 Thomas Building, University Park. This is the last lecture in the 2005 Penn State Lectures on the Frontiers of Science, an annual series designed as a free minicourse for the enjoyment and education of residents in Central Pennsylvania communities. The theme this year is "Einstein's Legacy: A centennial celebration of Einstein's 'miraculous year' and its influence on science today."Chan will discuss the prediction that Albert Einstein made with his colleague Satyendra Bose that a collection of certain types of particles at very cold temperatures can lose their individual identities and coalesce into a single entity known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In liquid helium, this transformation turns the liquid into a frictionless superfluid with a multitude of amazing properties. Although this effect was not thought to be possible in a solid, Chan and Penn State graduate student Eunseong Kim recently found evidence for such a "supersolid" helium phase. During his lecture, Chan will describe how his lab made this discovery.
Chan's research is aimed at answering or raising fundamental questions about matter in its various phases or states, such as liquid, solid and gas. He is particularly interested in phase transitions -- the conditions under which a material changes from one phase to another -- in quantum fluids, in reduced dimensions and in the presence of disorder. The principles he and his research group have helped to establish have proven to be useful in understanding a wide variety of problems in condensed-matter systems undergoing phase transitions.
For information, call (814) 863-0901, e-mail at science@psu.edu or click on the Web link at http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/frontiers