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Director's Colloquium focuses on physics in anthrax detection

The role physics can play in anthrax detection is the subject of a Director's Colloquium at 1:10 p.m., Tuesday (May 27), in the Physics Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3.

Professor Marlan Scully of Texas A&M University, will present the lecture. He is the author of more than 300 research articles and a standard textbook on laser physics.

Scully also co-edited "Ode to a Quantum Physicist," a retrospective of his scientific achievements. The book was published in celebration of his 60th birthday.

"Airborne contaminates such as bacterial spores are usually detected and analyzed by time consuming microscopic, chemical and biological methods," said Scully. "This talk will describe a different approach, one that derives from recent experiments in which atoms and molecules are prepared by one or more coherent lasers and probed by another set of lasers."

Scully said these laser studies have yielded such counter-intuitive results as ultra-slow light pulses with velocities on the order of 10 meters-per-second. The same kind of physics will be shown to allow the remote detection of anthrax in a way that is related to "Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Spectroscopy," he said.

Scully is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Physical Society, Optical Society of America, American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Max Planck Society — a German equivalent of the National Academy of Science.

He has doctoral and master's degrees in physics from Yale University. He also has a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from the University of Wyoming.

The colloquium will be broadcast on Labnet Channel 9 and can be accessed through the Internet using Real Media Live software.

For more information, contact Peter Milonni of Theoretical Division (T) at 7-7763 or write to pwm@lanl.gov by electronic mail.

Additional information on Director's Colloquiums is available at http://stb.lanl.gov/program/colloquium.shtml online.

-- Michael Carlson

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