The discovery of the laser by Ted Maiman in 1960 was greeted as a gift from the gods, to be able to pour watts of tuneable coherent light into just a few kilohertz along a line almost as straight as a geodesic. The laser has since revolutionised our daily lives, but it has also revolutionised scientific research. For instance, lasers now allow us to chill a cloud of atoms down to within just a few nanokelvin of absolute zero and to enter the strange quantum world of the Bose-Einstein condensate, predicted by Einstein in 1925 and realised in the laboratory some 70 years later. More recently, it has been predicted, by Krzysztof Sacha in Krakow, that a Bose-Einstein condensate, when periodically driven, can spontaneously reorganise its motion so that it evolves with a period some tens of times longer than the period of the drive, to form a new state of quantum matter – a ‘time crystal’.

In this lecture, Professor Hannaford will describe an experiment currently in progress at Swinburne to create such a big time crystal, which promises to allow us to extend condensed matter science to the fourth dimension – time!

Light refreshments will be served after the lecture.

Distinguished Professor Peter Hannaford AC

Professor Hannaford received a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He was a Chief Research Scientist at CSIRO in Clayton before moving to Swinburne University of Technology in 2001 to become Director of the Centre for Atom Optics and Ultrafast Spectroscopy and a University Distinguished Professor. He is currently a Professor Emeritus at Swinburne University and leader of the Time Crystals project within the Optical Sciences Centre. He has been a visiting scientist at the University of Reading, UK; the University of Otago, NZ; the University of Oxford, UK; the Max-Planck-Institute for Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany; the European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy, Florence, Italy; the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris; and the University of Innsbruck, Austria.