Science Events Audio

Speaker/Performer: Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Nobel Laureate and Honorary Professor, Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure Our ability to control and to manipulate atomic systems has considerably increased during the last few years. We will review in this lecture a few recent advances in this field, emphasizing in particular the new fruitful dialogue which is being established between atomic physics and other disciplines like statistical physics, condensed matter physics, molecular physics and quantum information. Very precise measurements with ultracold atoms provide now more refined tests of fundamental theories like general relativity. The possibility to control all experimental parameters of an ultracold atomic sample, like the temperature, the density, the strength of the interactions, allows one to realize simple models of more complex systems found in other fields of physics and to get a better understanding of their behavior.