ITHACA, N.Y. -- Carl E. Wieman, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, will discuss a new form of matter that occurs at record cold temperatures in a nontechnical talk on the Cornell University campus Oct. 9.

The talk, which is free and open to the public, will be given at 7:30 p.m. in Schwartz Auditorium of Rockefeller Hall. Wieman, a Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, will be presenting the second of his two Bethe Lectures at Cornell.

Wieman's talk, "Bose-Einstein Condensation: Quantum Weirdness at the Lowest Temperature in the Universe," will discuss a new form of matter predicted in 1924 by Albert Einstein, after work by Satyendra Nath Bose. Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) results when atoms at extremely low temperatures lose their separate identities and meld into a single "superatom." Wieman and his collaborators created the first condensate in a gas by cooling rubidium atoms to the unprecedented temperature of less than 100 billionths of a degree above absolute zero in 1995. This discovery created an entirely new branch of atomic physics and has led to new inventions, such as atom lasers and better atomic clocks.

The other lecture by Wieman in the Bethe series will be a discussion of BEC in a physics colloquium, not open to the public, on Oct. 7 at 4:30 p.m., also in Schwartz Auditorium.

Wieman obtained his undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He was on the faculty at the University of Michigan before moving to Colorado. He is winner of numerous prizes for both teaching and research and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Bethe Lectures, established by the Cornell Department of Physics and the College of Arts and Sciences, honors Hans A. Bethe, Cornell professor emeritus of physics, whose description of the nuclear processes powering the sun won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967. The lectures have been given annually since 1977.