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Physics of anthrax detection discussed at Director's Colloquium

Anthrax detection was the subject of a Director's Colloquium Tuesday at the Physics Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3. Professor Marlan Scully, the author of more than 300 research articles and a standard textbook on laser physics, said lasers have yielded such counter-intuitive results as ultra-slow light pulses with velocities on the order of 10 meters per second. Scully said airborne contaminates, such as bacterial spores, are usually detected and analyzed by time consuming microscopic, chemical and biological methods. Scully talked of different approaches that derive from recent experiments in which atoms and molecules are prepared by one or more coherent lasers and probed by another set of lasers. Scully is a professor at Texas A&M University. Photo by LeRoy N. Sanchez, Public Affairs

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