Physics Professor

This article was in the newspaper Friday. This is my Physics 102 Professor. He is hilarious! The first lecture he spent discussing relativity and time travel. Now he lectures to us like he knows that we don't really want to be there and its great! We learn a ton!!

Friday, September 8, 2006 - Last Modified Thursday, September 7, 2006 10:10PM
WSU professor builds sparce cooling gas device
ANDY JONES(Bio)STAFF WRITER

A WSU professor and an undergraduate student have teamed up to create a device capable of cooling gas to one-billionth of a degree above absolute zero.
The device, the first of it’s kind in the Pacific Northwest, was created by physics assistant professor Peter Engels between August 2004 and May 2005. In February 2005, junior physics major Collin Atherton joined him to assist with research.
The team has accomplished its goal of creating Bose-Einstein Condensate, or BEC, a rare type of matter that forms from atoms at minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit.
“It’s the coldest matter in the universe,” Atherton said.
Atoms cannot just be observed as tiny particles, but also as wavelengths. As atoms cool, their wavelengths lengthen until they overlap and consolidate into a superatom, also known as BEC.
Because this superatom is more visible than individual atoms under a microscope, it is easier for scientists to observe the properties of these colder atoms.
“BEC is like a magnifying glass,” Engels said. “It allows us to observe the weird behavior of quantum mechanics with an object that is very big.”
The theory of quantum mechanics is that at a sub-atomic level, atoms are controlled by the uncertainty principle – meaning it’s impossible to observe all properties of matter at the same time, Atherton said.
To understand quantum mechanics, Engels compared the atoms to photons given off by light bulbs. In classical physics, wavelengths and velocities of photons can be calculated. In quantum physics, those properties can’t be observed simultaneously.
Engels said scientists are only beginning to understand the “weird’ mechanics of quantum physics. The creation of BEC opens a wide range of experimental possibilities in nuclear physics
and astrophysics, he said.
To cool the atoms, gas is placed into a long tube surrounded by six laser beams, Engels said. The laser beams contain so much intensity that the atoms jolt backward upon contact, causing the atoms to slow down.
Engels compared the second stage, called evaporative cooling, to a cup of coffee. When coffee is finished heating, it lets off steam – the hottest molecules in the cup. For the atoms in Engels’ and Atherton’s device, the hot atoms are released, further reducing the temperature.
This process takes about a minute, Atherton said. Since the atoms only stay as BSE for a minute, he and Engels have to make their observations at a rapid pace. On a good day, they go through the process about 100 times, Atherton said.
Engels and Atherton spent their whole summer working with the new device, and even though school has started, they still experiment daily.

Here is a link to the faculty page, his picture is on there as well as another link to his research. http://www.physics.wsu.edu/Personnel/faculty/faculty.htm