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Biography
Influences
Achievements and Awards
Publications of Importance
Inventions or Contributions to Knowledge
Other Items of Interest
Internet Links of Significance
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A Danish physicist born in the town of Vejle on the east coast of Jutland.
Her father worked in the heating business and her mother in a store.
She skipped grade 10 and was thought to be a prodigy then proceeding to a "gymnasium," or the European equivalent of college in the USA.
She had a love affair with mathematics, especially geometry and its visualisation.
In 1989 was appointed as a postdoctoral fellow in Physics at Harvard University.
In 1991 she received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Aarhus in Denmark and joined the Rowland Institute for Science at Cambridge as a scientific staff member.
At the Arhus University, she re-discovered quantum mechanics, and has been working in that field ever since. Her research interests started in theoretical physics and moved to creating Bose-Einstein condensates. Her Ph.D. looked at the "channeling" of electrons along strings of atoms in a silicon crystal like a wave being guided or light passing along optical cable.
She speakes Danish, English, German and French.
She has undertaken research at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva.
Since 1999 she has been the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics at Harvard.
She has an honorary appointment to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences.
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- Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award, American Association of Physics Teachers, 2003;
- MacArthur Fellow ($500,000 ) 2001-2006;
- NKT award from the Danish Physical Society, 2001;
- Ole Rømer Medal, University of Copenhagen, 2001;
- Honorary Degree, Copenhagen, 2001;
- Samuel Friedman Rescue Award, the Friedman Foundation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2001;
- Year 2000 Award, Top Danmark Foundation, Copenhagen Denmark, 2000;
- J.C. Jacobsen 200 Year Anniversary Award, the Carlsberg Foundation, Denmark, 1989;
- Research Fellowship, 1986-1989, University of Aarhus, Denmark.
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Light travels at 186,282 miles a second (299,000 kilometres per second) and manipulating its speed was once thought impossible but no longer. Dr Hau's team having first slowed light to 38 miles per hour (60 kph) then down to one mile an hour (1.6 kph ) they eventually made the beam stop after entering a specially designed gas condensate (Bose-Einstein), a gas of sodium atoms in a magnetic 'atom trap', cooled to within a few millionths of a degree of absolute zero (-273 deg C).
Normally, the gas won't allow light to pass through it, but it can be made transparent to light of a certain colour by illuminating it with a laser beam, called the 'coupling beam'. This clears a path through the super cold condensate making it selectively transparent.
When the coupling laser is turned off then a probe beam stops dead in its tracks, unable to move further.
This results in the lasers complete localization and containment within the condensate. At the quantum level the pulses of laser are effectively stopped with the information initially contained in the laser fields 'frozen' in the atomic medium for up to 1 ms. When the controlling laser is turned back on the probe pulse is regenerated and the stored coherence is read out and transferred back into the radiation field.
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See also Ronald Walsworth and Mikhail Lukin in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.
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