Physics Department Colloquia |
Events During the Week of October 23rd through October 30th, 2011
Monday, October 24th, 2011
- No events scheduled
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
- No events scheduled
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
- No events scheduled
Thursday, October 27th, 2011
- No events scheduled
Friday, October 28th, 2011
- Nature Adorns a Vacuum: The Casimir Force
- Time: 3:30 pm
- Place: 2241 Chamberlin Hall (coffee at 4:30 pm)
- Speaker: Steve Lamoreaux, Yale University
- Abstract: In 1948, Hendrik Casimir showed that two perfectly conducting parallel plates will be mutually attracted. This attraction is due to the modification of the the electromagnetic field mode structure between the plates, which leads to a change in the zero point energy of the field. It has only been within the last 15 years that this force has been measured to good precision, and recently the effect of finite temperature (300 K) has been measured, for the first time, in our laboratory at Yale. The notion that boundaries can affect the zero point energy of a system has broad application throughout physics, and some applications will be discussed, along with an overview of our experimental work.
- Host: Heeger