Nobel Laureate David J. Wineland to address CUK on Foundation Day

The Central University of Kerala will have the 4th lecture in the Distinguished Lecture Series by Nobel laureate Prof. David J. Wineland on March 2. The talk coincides with the 13th Foundation Day of the University. The lecture will be held online on March 2 at 8.30 am. David J. Wineland, a Professor at the University of Oregon in the United States, was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research in quantum computing.

National Education Policy Committee member Prof. M.K. Sreedhar will deliver the Foundation Day Lecture. Vice-Chancellor Prof. H. Venkateshwar will preside over the function. Cultural activities will also be held as a part of the event.

Hon’ble Vice-chancellor Prof. H Venkateshwarlu introduced the Distinguished Lecture Series to bring Nobel laureates and other eminent scholars (online or offline mode) for lecture and possible interaction with the students, which can motivate the younger minds for taking up a research career in future. The research and faculty fraternity will also be highly appreciated as it can provide updated information on cutting-edge research and developments around the world.

The first lecture in the series was delivered in February 2021 by Nobel laureate Prof. Edward Moser, whereas the second was in May by Prof. Ramamoorthy Ramesh, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 2014. The third in the series was by Nobel laureate Martin Lee Chalfie in July. 

Prof. David J Wineland

Prof. David J Wineland is an American Nobel-laureate physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) physics laboratory. His work has included advances in optics, specifically laser-cooling trapped ions and using ions for quantum-computing operations. He was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Serge Haroche, for "ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems", the very first steps towards building a new type of super-fast computer based on quantum physics. Perhaps the quantum computer will change our everyday lives in this century in the same radical way as the classical computer did in the last century.

The research has also led to the construction of extremely precise clocks that could become the future basis for a new standard of time, with more than a hundred-fold greater precision than present-day Cesium clocks. We have entered the realm of quantum physics. For several decades, most of the quantum phenomena could only be explained, studied or investigated theoretically. In the late 1970s, David Wineland designed ingenious experiments to study quantum phenomena through light-matter interaction. He has successfully captured electrically charged atoms, or ions, in a kind of trap using electric fields and studied them with the “help of small packets of light, or photons”. Prof. Wineland will be talking about the Atomic clocks that can revolutionize our future life.