Hamburg Photon Science Colloquium: SIMULATING NEUTRON STARS IN THE LABORATORY

by Christophe Salomon (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France)

Friday 15 Apr 2016, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Berlin

CFEL, Bldg. 99 (DESY Hamburg)

Our Universe displays a vast panoply of exotic objects like the Earth, black holes, or neutron stars. With a mass of twice the Sun mass and a radius of ~10 km, a neutron star is a very dense object. At a temperature of 10⁸ K, the spin 1/2 neutrons are believed to be in a superfluid state. We will show how dilute gases prepared by laser techniques at the other extreme of the temperature scale, in the Nano kelvin range, can help us to understand the superfluid state of neutron stars.