Dear EFRC Folks, If you'd like to meet with David Snoke tomorrow (Tuesday June 14), please contact me and we can arrange it. He'll be here on sabbatical this fall so if you'd like to be on his radar screen for then, this is a chance to make contact. Hope to see some of you at the talk tomorrow - Keith ------------------------------------------------------ Professor Keith A Nelson Tel: 617-253-1423 MIT Room 6-235 Fax: 617-253-7030 Department of Chemistry Email: kanelson@mit.edu<mailto:kanelson@mit.edu> 77 Massachusetts Avenue http://nelson.mit.edu/ Cambridge, MA 02139 From: Cathy Bourgeois [mailto:cmbourg@MIT.EDU] Sent: Monday, June 13, 2011 8:29 AM To: efrc-all(a)mit.edu Subject: FW: Snoke poster Informal Seminar Polariton Condensates Prof. David W. Snoke, Department of Physics and Astronomy University of Pittsburgh Tuesday, June 14, Noon Building 4 , Room 237 Abstract: Polaritons are short-lifetime, quasi-number conserved particles with very light effective mass (four orders of magnitude less than an electron) which exist inside specially designed nanostructured solids. During their existence, they act to a very good approximation as a weakly interacting Bose gas, and undergo Bose- Einstein condensation. In the past five years there has been an explosion of new experiments on polariton condensates, including Josephson junction contacts between two condensates, imaging of pinned vortices, measurement of the onset time for coherence, solitonlike motion of a polariton superfluid over long distances, and measurement of the momentum distribution and spatial distribution in a harmonic trap. This talk will be partly review of recent work by others, and partly a focus on our work in Pittsburgh to distinguish between a polariton condensation and from a standard semiconductor laser. Both emit coherent light, but the two transitions are experimentally distinguishable.