Lecture - Distinguished Professor Peter Hannaford AC: Crystallizing Time with Lasers
To celebrate his appointment as a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for eminent service to science, please join Swinburne Distinguished Professor Peter Hannaford as he discusses the fascinating realm of 'Time Crystals'.
The discovery of the laser by Ted Maiman in 1960 was greeted as a gift from the gods, to be able to pour watts of tuneable coherent light into just a few kilohertz along a line almost as straight as a geodesic. The laser has since revolutionised our daily lives, but it has also revolutionised scientific research. For instance, lasers now allow us to chill a cloud of atoms down to within just a few nanokelvin of absolute zero and to enter the strange quantum world of the Bose-Einstein condensate, predicted by Einstein in 1925 and realised in the laboratory some 70 years later. More recently, it has been predicted, by Krzysztof Sacha in Krakow, that a Bose-Einstein condensate, when periodically driven, can spontaneously reorganise its motion so that it evolves with a period some tens of times longer than the period of the drive, to form a new state of quantum matter – a ‘time crystal’.
In this lecture, Professor Hannaford will describe an experiment currently in progress at Swinburne to create such a big time crystal, which promises to allow us to extend condensed matter science to the fourth dimension – time!