Baym

What happens to matter when it is heated to more than 250,000 times the temperature in the center of the sun? When cooled to 1 billion times colder than interstellar space? Physicist Gordon Baym will discuss the terrestrial experiments that explore these extremes as Cornell's 2013 Hans Bethe lecturer. His public lecture, "Quarks and Cold Atoms: From the Hottest to the Coldest Places in the Universe," will be March 27 at 7:30 p.m. in Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall.

Baym, professor of physics and the George and Anne Fisher Professor of Engineering Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been focusing his recent work on theoretical studies of the quark-gluon plasma, which existed in the first few microseconds after the big bang. These plasmas are created on Earth by colliding gold atoms at ultrarelativistic speeds. In parallel he has been studying Bose-Einstein condensates and related quantum states found in laser cooled atomic clouds. Baym has found unexpected connections between these extreme forms of matter.

In the 1970s and '80s, Baym collaborated with Nobel laureate and Cornell physics professor Hans Bethe, solving important problems involving neutron stars and supernovae. In addition to his significant contributions to astrophysics and nuclear theory, Baym had an early and continuing influence on theoretical condensed matter physics. His book, "Lectures on Quantum Mechanics," has been a basic text for teaching quantum mechanics to graduate students worldwide. He has also maintained a lifelong interest in, and has made major contributions to, the scholarly study of the history of physics.

Baym has received many awards; most recently he shared the 2011 Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal for his contributions to many-body physics. He also received the 2002 Hans Bethe Prize from the American Physical Society for his "superb synthesis of fundamental concepts."As part of the Hans Bethe Lecture series, Baym will also present the physics colloquium, "Two Slit Diffraction With Highly Charged Particles: Niels Bohr's Consistency Argument that the Electromagnetic Field Must Be Quantized," March 25 at 4 p.m. in Schwartz Auditorium; and a Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics seminar, "The Landau Criterion for Superfluidity Is Neither Necessary nor Sufficient," March 26 at 2 p.m. in 700 Clark Hall.

The Hans Bethe Lectures, established by the Department of Physics and the College of Arts and Sciences, honor Bethe, who was Cornell professor of physics from 1936 until his death in 2005. Bethe won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967 for his description of the nuclear processes that power the sun.

Linda B. Glaser is staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.