Berkeley hosts the West Coast Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, a three-day event (January 17-19, 2014), designed to encourage attendees to pursue careers in a field where women are still a minority. Talks, panel discussions, lab tours and a career fair will be held the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The conference, which will draw nearly 170 women from the western U.S. who major in physics and related fields, is one of eight concurrent regional conferences sponsored by the American Physical Society that attract about 1,000 women nationwide. Video produced by Roxanne Makasdjian & Phil Ebiner http://www.berkeley.edu http://www.facebook.com/UCBerkeley http://twitter.com/UCBerkeley

Physics 111 Advanced Laboratory. Professor Sumner Davis This is the first of two videos accompanying the Non-Linear Spectroscopy and Magneto-Optics Experiment, providing students with an introduction to the theory, apparatus, and procedures. The experiment consists of three sections: (1) students learn to operate a diode laser system and characterize its performance using a Fabry-Perot spectrum analyzer, (2) Doppler-broadened laser-induced fluorescence and Doppler-free saturated absorption spectra of the rubidium D2 line (780 nm) are recorded and analyzed, and (3) the near-resonant magneto-optical rotation is investigated. Nonlinear light-atom interaction leads to spectacular manifestations of the resonant Faraday Effect - polarization plane rotation in a magnetic field applied along the direction of light propagation radically different from the linear case. In particular, narrow (~30 Hz) effective line widths are observed in this experiment corresponding to a rotation enhancement by some seven orders of magnitude compared to the linear Faraday rotation. http://advancedlab.org