Lene Vestergaard Hau is a Danish scientist and educator who
was born on November 13, 1959. She holds the Mallinckrodt Professorship of
Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. Cold atoms and Bose-Einstein
condensates are the focus of Hau’s most recent research. Her team effectively
precools atoms to microkelvin temperatures using laser cooling. By optically
producing quantum interference in a Bose-Einstein condensate, the Hau group has
succeeded in lowering the speed of light, first to seventeen meters per second
and then to zero meters per second.
In 1991 she joined the Rowland Institute for
Science at Cambridge, Massachusetts as a scientific staff member, beginning to
explore the possibilities of slow light and cold atoms. In 1999 at the age of forty,
Hau accepted a two-year appointment as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard
University. Her formalized training is in theoretical physics, but her interest
moved to experimental research in an effort to create a new form of matter
known as a Bose–Einstein condensate. “Hau applied to the National Science
Foundation for funds to make a batch of this condensate but was rejected on the
grounds that she was a theorist for whom such experiments would be too very difficult
to do.