Office of Science & Technology - Physics with Rudi Grimm: A (Very) Cool Adventure

Physics with Rudi Grimm: A (Very) Cool Adventure

bridges vol. 25, April 2010 / People in the Spotlight

By Mathias Höbinger

Rudolf Grimm

"Science is exciting, fun, and it can be a real adventure!" Some of us might have gotten a message like this from a physics or chemistry teacher back in high school. The fact is, though, that although many give their best, high school science teachers are not exactly trend setters for teenagers when it comes to what's cool or exciting. The message would certainly get more attention if someone like Oprah or David Beckham would champion the cause of science - but TV stars and sports figures tend to be preoccupied with figuring out sponsoring contracts and other issues ... So what science really needs is some former rock star who had conquered the charts but then decided to put his guitar into a corner to study physics instead. Of course, it would be even better if this rocker-turned-researcher had become a really good physicist, winning some prestigious prizes and eventually becoming famous for discovering some really important stuff. Now that would get the message across! You think this sounds more like a science fiction story than science? Well, meet Austrian Scientist of the Year and quantum physicist Rudolf Grimm who, according to his web site, works at the "coolest place in Austria."

↓

From Punk-Rock Star to Scientist of the Year.

Growing up in the German city of Hannover, Grimm was fascinated by lasers from the day his physics teacher took the entire class on a field trip to see some. Grimm cites his teacher as an inspiration (apparently there actually are some science teachers around who manage to turn the tide for science) and remembers that "he brought us to an institute at the University of Hannover that was doing laser physics. When we visited, I saw operating lasers, and got hooked."

But before Grimm devoted his professional life to these intriguing colorful beams of light (most of which, by the way, are invisible since nowadays they are infrared, a fact that Grimm notes with a slight sigh during the interview), he took a quite successful detour into show business for a couple years - only to find out that physics was far more exciting to him. Grimm decided to swear off speedo pictures with his punk rock band "Bärchen und die Milchbubis," in Germany's most popular youth magazine Bravo, in favor of publishing articles with his University of Innsbruck research group in journals like Nature and Science. In his career as a physicist, it took him a little longer to make the front cover, but now he competes with the best groups in his field worldwide.

So what is it about the "coolest place"? Well, Grimm actually uses laser light to cool atoms and other particles to unbelievably low temperatures - but first things first. After abandoning his guitar for good in 1983, he began working with lasers during his studies at the University of Hannover, and from that point on they became the recurring thread of his professional career. When working with laser spectroscopy for his Ph.D. dissertation in Zurich, where he had followed his revered advisor Jürgen Mlynek, Grimm first discovered that the laser light they were shining into various samples had a small mechanical effect: "When shining the laser in the vapor, it pushes the atoms a little bit," he explains. This can be conceptualized by describing light as a stream of particles, photons, which don't have mass in the common sense but do possess a certain momentum which they can transfer to other particles. After studying these effects for an additional year at the Institute of Spectroscopy near Moscow, where he met his future wife Tatiana, Grimm joined the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg in 1990. There he first started to use laser light to slow down particles and, after a couple of years, creating "really very cold atoms" had become his main research focus. Since the idea of cooling particles with light might sound counter-intuitive at first, let's take a look at the basic principles of these techniques.

Access to the full article is free, but requires you to register. Registration is simple and quick – all we need is your name and a valid e-mail address. We appreciate your interest in bridges.

Bridges Issues

Podcast