The character arc of Lene Hau
Born 13 November 1959 in Vejle, Denmark, and long at Harvard in the United States. Between then and now sit three degrees at Aarhus, a decision to leave theory for the bench that funders said a theorist could not manage, a beam of light slowed to about seventeen metres per second, the first complete stop of light, and a light pulse stored in one cloud of atoms and reborn as light in another. The line below draws the story so far, in order.
Tap the line to pluck it. Hover or tap any mark for its card. Drawn from the public record of her life; the sources are at the foot of the page.
Who is Lene Hau?
She made light stand still.
The headline the world ran was that a physicist had slowed light to bicycle speed. What sits under it is a harder story. Trained as a theorist at the University of Aarhus, Lene Hau chose to build experiments with her own hands, and when she applied to the National Science Foundation to make the ultracold cloud of atoms she needed, she was turned down on the grounds that a theorist would find such work too difficult. She found other funding and built the apparatus anyway.
In February 1999 her team at Harvard sent a beam of light through a Bose-Einstein condensate, a cloud of sodium atoms held near absolute zero, and slowed it to about seventeen metres per second, roughly the pace of a bicycle. Two years later she stopped a pulse completely, holding it in the atoms and releasing it intact, the first person to do so. In 2007 her group stored a light pulse as a pattern in one cloud of atoms, carried that pattern across, and revived it as light in a second cloud, information passing from light into matter and back. The same year she slowed light she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Her line is worth reading because the thing that was supposed to stop it, the judgement that a theorist could not do experimental work, is the thing she answered by doing the experiment nobody thought possible. She is still at Harvard, still leading the lab, and the field she opened now sits near the centre of the work on quantum memory and quantum computing.
The moments
Lene Hau's timeline.
The 1980s
A start in mathematics
Milestone. Her first Aarhus degree was in mathematics, before physics and then quantum theory.
The 1990s
A doctorate at Aarhus
Milestone. A PhD in quantum theory, the last of three Aarhus degrees, before she left theory for the bench.
Stay in theory, or build
Crossroads, decided.
The paths laid out: take the bench, taken, or stay a theorist. Eight years later her apparatus slowed light to about seventeen metres per second, and then she stopped it altogether.
Crossed to Cambridge
Milestone, and it changed her direction. She joined the Rowland Institute in Massachusetts, a theorist choosing to build experiments by hand.
Few women at the bench
Setback, and it changed her direction. She entered experimental atomic physics with very few women in the field, and as a theorist doubted by those who decide what gets funded.
The grant was refused
Setback, and it changed her direction. The National Science Foundation turned her down, judging that a theorist would find such experiments too hard. She found other funding and built the apparatus anyway.
Light slowed to a bicycle
Milestone, and it changed everything. Her team slowed a beam of light to about seventeen metres per second, roughly bicycle speed, through a cloud of sodium atoms near absolute zero.
The 2000s
She stopped light
Milestone, and it changed everything. A pulse was brought to a complete stop and held in the atoms, then released intact. She was the first to do it.
Named a MacArthur Fellow
Milestone. The five year, no strings grant, often called the genius grant, arrived the same year she stopped light.
Light turned to matter
Milestone, and it changed everything. A light pulse was stored as a pattern in one cloud of atoms, carried across, and revived as light in a second cloud, passing from light into matter and back.
The Ledlie Prize at Harvard
Milestone. Harvard's Ledlie Prize, for research that makes the most valuable contribution to science and benefits humankind.
Into the Academy
Milestone. Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, her work now part of the field's foundation.
The 2020s
Still leading the lab
Everyday. Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics at Harvard, still running the lab that slowed and stopped light.
The line reaches today still adding to itself, which is why it is drawn now rather than at the end. What it set moving is already everywhere: light that can be slowed, stopped and stored, and every person told they were the wrong kind of scientist for the work who decided to do it anyway.
Your turn
Every story draws a unique line.
Hers is decades of patient building and still going. Yours is already further along than you think, and drawing it takes about a minute.
Sources
- Wikipedia, Lene Hau.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Lene Hau.
- MacTutor History of Mathematics, biography of Lene Vestergaard Hau.
- Encyclopedia.com, Hau, Lene Vestergaard.
- L. V. Hau et al., Nature, 18 February 1999, on light slowed to 17 metres per second.
- C. Liu, Z. Dutton, C. H. Behroozi, L. V. Hau, Nature, 25 January 2001, on halted light pulses.
- N. S. Ginsberg, S. R. Garner, L. V. Hau, Nature, 8 February 2007, on light stored in matter.
- The MacArthur Foundation Fellows, 2001.
- Hau Lab at Harvard, and the Harvard Department of Physics faculty page.