Women explore the frontiers of physics

Lene Vestergaard Hau
Danish-born Hau and her research group at Harvard study Bose-Einstein condensates, clouds of ultra-cold atoms whose behavior was predicted by Einstein's theories. The weird clouds, which act like one big atom, were first created in the lab only a decade ago.

Using a complicated laser system, Hau's group has been able to slow pulses of light to a dead stop inside the atom cloud, then start it up again. The phenomenon could lead to new types of optical data processing, Hau said.

"One could imagine putting a whole three-dimensional image into the medium, and one could then store it there in highly, highly compressed form," she said. "We have a theoretical paper out where we clearly show that the system can be used for coherent processing of optical information."

Hau, who received a $500,000 MacArthur "genius" grant in 2001, said she never really gave much thought to being "a physicist of a particular gender" until just a few years ago. "When I see weird behavior [from male colleagues], my first inclination is not to think, 'What's wrong with me,'" she said. "It's, 'What the heck is wrong with these guys?'"

Deborah Jin

CU-Boulder Deborah Jin is a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Like Hau, Jin has received a MacArthur grant (Class of 2003) for her work with ultra-cold condensates. Jin and her group at JILA, jointly operated by the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, figured out how to create a "super-atom" from a class of quantum particles known as fermions — a class that includes the subatomic particles we all know and love: protons, electrons and neutrons.

Making fermionic condensates is even trickier than creating Bose-Einstein condensates, but since the process works with more "ordinary" stuff, it could point the way toward breakthrough technologies ranging from better atomic clocks to super-efficient, superconducting circuitry.

Janet Conrad

Columbia Univ. Janet Conrad studies "flavors" of neutrinos.

Conrad is a physics professor at Columbia University in New York but commutes to Fermilab in the Chicago area to work on experiments relating to neutrinos. Those hard-to-detect subatomic particles just might hold the key to the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, little-understood phenomena that account for 95 percent of the universe.

The focus of Conrad's work is a 40-foot-round, oil-filled metal sphere at Fermilab that has been designed to detect the oscillations between different "flavors" of neutrinos. Results from the MiniBooNE detector could help physicists readjust their calculations for the universe's matter content, or point to revisions in the foundation for particle physics, known as the standard model.

"Every physicist's goal is to find out what's wrong with the standard model," Conrad explained. "It's a model rather than a theory, because it doesn't come from first principles. We believe that this has to be a reflection of some kind of larger theory, so we want to see beyond the standard model. Neutrinos are turning out to be a very rich place to do that."

In addition to her strictly scientific work, Conrad is a proselytizer for particle physics, serving as the chief organizer for this month's NeutrinoFest in Florida.

Ann Nelson

Courtesy of Ann Nelson Ann Nelson theorizes on as-yet-undiscovered particles.

Nelson and her colleagues at the University of Washington concentrate on theories that go beyond the standard model. Just last year, the Washington group proposed an explanation that links dark energy with interactions between neutrinos and yet-to-be-discovered particles dubbed "accelerons."

"It's the only theory on dark energy relating to particles that we know exist," Nelson said. If the theory checks out, then the expansion of the universe should eventually slow down to a crawl over the course of billions of years.

She said the theory would explain anomalies in neutrino behavior, such as those observed by the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Future efforts to detect supersymmetry — the pairing of the standard model's particles with as-yet-unseen "shadow" partners — could turn up indirect evidence for accelerons, Nelson said.

Marcela Carena

Fermilab Visual Media Services Marcela Carena focuses on a theory called electroweak baryogenesis.

Dark matter? Check. Supersymmetry? Check. Extra dimensions? Check. Matter-antimatter imbalance? Check. Higgs boson? Check. Grand unified theory? Check. The theoretical work that Argentine-born Carena is doing at Fermilab relates not just to one, but at least six of the mysteries of modern physics.

"We hope that by looking at one part of the puzzle, we'll know what's happening in another part of the puzzle," she said. "We need to look at all these questions at the same time, or look at the whole, or otherwise we lose all those links."

Her key question has to do with finding the energy level that marks the transition between ordinary particles and the uncharted world of supersymmetric particles. If high-energy accelerators can hit that level, the way particles behave could help Carena and her colleagues fill in several areas of the puzzle at once.

Carena also advises Latin American students as part of a Fermilab educational program, and she said the situation for women physicists has "changed quite a bit" for the better. "There are many more role models for young female students, to show that you can have a life as a mother as well as a scientist," said Carena.

Maria Spiropulu

Philip Phillips / UIUC Maria Spiropulu says future experiments will “stun the world.”

Greek-born Spiropulu is the co-leader of a research group looking into supersymmetric particles and other phenomena beyond the standard model at CERN, Europe's premier particle-physics lab and the birthplace of the World Wide Web. Such phenomena could point the way to extra spatial dimensions beyond the three we perceive today.

Right now, Spiropulu and her colleagues are gearing up for the 2007 startup of the world's latest and greatest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. Spiropulu promises that the LHC experiments "will stun the world" and realize at least some of Einstein's dreams about bridging the gaps in theories relating to particle physics, gravity and cosmology.

"He was among the first to think seriously on all these issues, even at the beginning of the 20th century," she said in an e-mail. "The accelerating universe / cosmological constant conundrum and the possibility of extra space dimensions were all topics that Einstein dealt with already back then. With the LHC, we have a huge opportunity to experimentally explore these ideas."

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