Creating the coolest objects in the Universe

On 20 March 2018, for the Cambridge Science Festival  the Intellectual Forum was pleased to host Jesus College Fellow, Ulrich Schneider, to explore how you can make things colder than anything in outer space. 

Schneider conducted the first live experiment conducted in the College’s new Frankopan Hall, while exploring questions like: how cold can you make things in a lab? And how do you do it? Does something interesting happen? And why should we care?

He detailed how we, surprisingly, use lasers, and suggested "yes, certainly interesting things happen" as the particles, for instance, can lose their individual identity and form part of one giant matterwave. This is called Bose-Einstein Condensation.

The experiment and much of the event received interest and watchers from around the world on Twitter and Periscope. You can follow the Intellectual Forum for future live events here.