A physics professor at the College of William & Mary has been named a Fulbright Scholar.
Seth Aubin, an associate professor, earned the honor for the 2014-15 academic year by Fulbright Canada, an organization that encourages mutual understanding between the U.S. and Canada through academic and cultural exchange.
He will work at TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, working on an experiment to study parity symmetry in laser-cooled francium atoms.
Parity symmetry is an integral component of gravity, and says that a system stays the same even if a its special properties are reversed — that a mirror image of Newton’s apple falling is subject to the same gravitational pull as the original apple.
Aubin will be looking at an exception to parity symmetry, which happens in the weak nuclear force, the part responsible for radioactive decay, of an atom.
His group will use laser cooling to chill atoms to temperatures many times colder than outer space.
