Abstract: |
Title: Twisting the quantum
Speaker: Prof. Charles W. Clark
Joint Quantum Institute, National Institute of Standards and Technology
and University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland, USA
Time and Location: Thursday, March 3, 2016
2:00 pm, Seminar room pond, RISC, Hagenberg
Abstract:
Wave motions in nature were known to the ancients, and their mathematical
expression in physics today is essentially the same as that first provided
by d'Alembert and Euler in the mid-18th century. Yet it was only in 1992
that physicists managed to control a basic property of light waves: their
ability to swirl about their axis of propagation. During the past 10 years
such techniques of control have also been implemented in atoms, electrons
and neutrons.
I will present a simple description of these phenomena suited for
mathematicians, emphasizing basic properties of the wave equation and the
role of special functions, and showing how these are applied in our recent
work on twisting neutron waves.*
*C. W. Clark, et al., Nature 525, 504 (2015) |