2025: Year of Quantum
How physics at the smallest scales impacts materials, human health, computing, communications and more
“A tale of two gases: Classical and quantum”
Presented by Marcos Rigol
Professor of Physics
February 15, 2025
100 Thomas Building
11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
The motion of particles in a classical gas is famously chaotic. A simple and common consequence of this chaos is that an enclosed gas equilibrates to a single temperature, which is why letting cold air into a room lowers the temperature of the whole room. In the last three decades, physics experiments have achieved such unprecedented control over the microscopic world that it is now possible to study equivalent situations with quantum gases. The findings have been rather surprising. Sometimes quantum gases act like classical ones and sometimes they act completely differently, settling into a state that cannot even be described by a temperature. In this lecture, Rigol will show that quantum theory allows us to understand both behaviors and to tell in advance exactly how a quantum gas will behave when taken out of equilibrium. Rigol will also discuss the potential applications of those developments.
Marcos Rigol is a professor of physics at Penn State. Before joining Penn State, he was an associate professor of physics at Georgetown University. Rigol’s research focuses on quantum systems with many particles, in which he looks for emergent phenomena in equilibrium, e.g., exotic quantum phases, and out of equilibrium, e.g., thermalization. Rigol’s research is at the interface between atomic, molecular, optical, and condensed matter physics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Kavli fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. Marcos received the faculty scholar medal for outstanding achievement in the physical sciences at Penn State in 2019, and a young scientist prize of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) in 2011. He is recognized by the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Group as a highly cited researcher in the field of physics. Marcos received his Ph.D. in Physics (Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He completed his undergraduate (Summa Cum Laude) and M.Sc. studies at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences and Technology in Havana, Cuba.