Herbert Kroemer, who shared the 2000 Nobel prize in physics "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics" is among a dozen scientists who will present free public lectures in Sonoma State University's popular "What Physicists Do" series this spring.
Margaret Murnane, who won a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship for her work with ultrafast lasers, will also describe her work to SSU's students and faculty and guests from the community. Murnane, a professor at the University of Colorado, will speak April 9.
Lectures will be on Mondays at 4 p.m., from Feb. 4 through May 6, except Feb. 18 and April 1, in room 108 Darwin Hall on the SSU campus.
Kroemer will present a version of the lecture he gave in Stockholm a year ago, subtitled "Teaching Electrons New Tricks," on March 4. He was scheduled to give this talk last September but was stranded in Korea when the planes stopped flying due to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington.
Other speakers include Thomas Jarrett of JPL, who is coming from Pasadena to describe a massive survey of the universe in infrared light, and Wallace Tucker, coauthor of a recent book on the Chandra X-ray Observatory, who will speak on black holes and what has been learned about them with Chandra.
Denise Krol of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab will speak on glass and its novel applications in photonics, while J. Campbell Scott of IBM will describe organic light emitting diodes for flat panel displays.
Joe Jordan of NASA Ames Research Center will describe atmospheric wonders in the sky, and retired UCLA physicist Marvin Chester will speak on Physics as Symmetry.
SSU student Allan Baker will describe the adventures he had spending a winter at the South Pole, where he worked on a number of physics and astronomy experiments.
The series will open Feb. 4 with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab physicist Kevin Lesko describing the exciting results of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory's observations of neutrinos from the sun. The Canadian observatory, which operates more than a mile below the ground, uses 10,000 photomultiplier tubes inserted in a stainless steel frame built in Petaluma to detect the elusive particles.
SSU professor Joe Tenn, who is directing the series, expresses his gratitude to the donors who have made it possible to bring such distinguished speakers to SSU for the privately-funded series.
For a free poster describing all twelve lectures, see http://phys-astro.sonoma.edu/wpd/, send e-mail to gayle.walker@sonoma.edu, or call (707) 664-2119.
