Nobel Laureate John Hall is the featured speaker at the Center for High Technology Materials (CHTM) Distinguished Lecture Friday, May 6 at 10 a.m. The lecture titled, “Intracavity Nonlinear Spectroscopy, technical issues, and scientific opportunities,” will be held in CHTM room 103. A discussion follows the lecture.

Hall, a lecturer in the physics department at the University of Colorado-Boulder, shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics with T.W. Hänsch and Roy Glauber for "contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique."

He will discuss cavity-enhanced spectroscopy by its coherent field build-up transforms a few ppm absorption into some percent of changed transmission, and organizes interaction with free-flying molecules such that most interactions with the probing light lead to a detected change in the observed light. So with vibration-insensitive cavity design, one is looking at a lunch-box-sized replacement for the best currently-commercial quantum oscillator, the Hydrogen maser.

He has authored more than 230 articles in refereed journals and holds ten U.S. patents. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society. He is also a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a Fellow Adjoint of JILA.

Hall has trained numerous graduate students and post docs in the Physics Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His JILA work has been recognized through a number of awards from NIST, the Department of Commerce, and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. He has been awarded many professional, peer-generated honors by the Optical Society and the American Physical Society. In 2004, he received the IEEE Rabi Award and became a member of the French Légion d'Honneu.

For more information abou Hall, visit Nobel Laureate presents CHTM Distinguished Lecture.