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Robert C. Forrey ’86, associate professor of physics at Penn State’s Berks-Lehigh Valley campus, recently returned to campus to speak on “Ultracold Collisions with Molecular ‘Super Rotors’.” Free pizza was provided for the talk, which was sponsored by the Physics Club.
Forrey discussed his research in ultracold atomic and molecular collisions, a subject that involves basic ideas of quantum mechanics. His work is funded by the National Science Foundation.
“Normally we think of ice as being very cold,” says Forrey. “But ultracold temperatures are typically one billion times colder than ice.”
“The thing to remember about ultracold physics is that it deals with very dilute systems, so matter does not change phase from a gas to a liquid to a solid as it is cooled. Instead it remains a gas. At ordinary temperatures, particles in a gas collide with one another like tiny billiard balls. But as the temperature gets colder, the particles no longer behave like billiard balls. They still interact with each other, but they act as waves. My research aims to provide a detailed quantum mechanical description of these interacting waves.”
Ultracold physics is a rapidly growing area of research. In the past ten years, the field has achieved a new phase of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate or BEC. BEC’s are now being used to create matter wave lasers, which are like ordinary light lasers except that they are made up of atomic or molecular matter waves.
An electrical engineering graduate, Forrey received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Delaware in 1994. He was a research associate at Harvard University for eight years before accepting his current position with Penn State University.
“I was first introduced to quantum mechanics at Lafayette in a modern physics course taught by Professor Lyle Hoffman,” he says. “That experience motivated me to go on to graduate school to study theoretical physics.”
Prior Physics Club brown bags this fall: