The Institute of Physics in Ireland is hosting a free Physics High Flyers event this Saturday in Dublin. Five eminent physicists, including Nobel Prize winner Prof Jerome Friedman and Irish physicist Margaret Murnane, will be sharing their scientific insights.
The event itself is running as part of Dublin’s 2012 tenure as European City of Science. It will take place at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland on Saturday on St Stephen’s Green, starting from 9.15am, and the event is free and open to all.
Speakers also include Prof Henry Kapteyn, Prof Cecilia Jarlskog and Prof Anton Zeilinger.
The five world-renowned physicists will be speaking in an informal atmosphere about their careers, research and the future of physics and science in general.
Prof Jerome Friedman
Prof Jerome Friedman jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 for the experimental discovery of quarks, along with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor.
The Chicago-born physicist is an experimental particle physicist whose research has encompassed studies of particle structure and interactions with high-energy electrons, neutrinos, and hadrons. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Friedman is an institute professor and a professor of physics at MIT.
Prof Margaret Murnane
Prof Margaret Murnane won the 2011 RDS Irish Times Boyle Medal for Scientific Excellence. She is a fellow of JILA (formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) and a faculty member in physics at the University of Colorado, where she runs a joint, multi-disciplinary, research group with her husband, Prof Henry Kapteyn.
She received her BSc and MSc degrees from University College Cork and her PhD degree from UC Berkeley. Murnane is at the forefront of ultra-short pulsed laser research.
Prof Anton Zeilinger
Quantum physicist Prof Anton Zeilinger is a pioneer in the new field of quantum information and quantum optics. Born in Austria in 1945, he is currently professor of physics at University of Vienna.
He is author of the book Dance of the Photons, which he penned for the general reader. In 2010, Zeilinger received the Wolf Prize in Physics.
Prof Henry Kapteyn
Prof Henry Kapteyn is co-recipient of the 2010 Schawlow Prize of the American Physical Society and the 2010 R.W. Wood Prize of the Optical Society of America.
Kapteyn’s work at Washington State University (done in collaboration with his wife Murnane) resulted in the development of a new generation of lasers to make it straightforward to produce light pulse of less than 10 femtoseconds’ duration.
Kapteyn has been a professor at the Department of Physics, and a fellow of JILA, at the University of Colorado since 1999.
Prof Cecilia Jarlskog
Prof Cecilia Jarlskog is the president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and the Royal Physiographic Society in Lund.
She received her PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1970 at the University of Lund.
Her major areas of research in physics are symmetries, matter-antimatter asymmetry, neutrino physics, grand unification.
She has been a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics (1989-2000) and an adviser to the director-general of CERN on Member States (1998- 2004).
Because places are limited for Saturday’s event, those interested should contact the Institute of Physics in Ireland.