"If history is any guide, 10 years from now this big laboratory curiosity could well become the right size," Narayanamurti said.

According to Narayanamurti, Hau's work opens new possibilities for interdepartmental research.

"Harvard has a fine tradition with nonlinear optics and atomic physics, and Lene brings these things together in unusual ways, which will probably mean new connections with [DEAS] and physics," he said.

Hau, who has been a member of the research staff at the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge's Kendall Square since 1991, has team-taught a Harvard first-year seminar, "Physicists and Scientific Problems," with another McKay professor of applied physics, Jene A. Golovchenko, for the last five years.

Hau became interested in slowing down light and Bose-Einstein condensates in the late 1980s, while a graduate student at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.

"I became aware that there was this new field emerging, that you could use lasers to cool atoms down to extremely low temperatures," Hau said. "Each time you cool, you move into a new regime of nature, and that's where new things are bound to happen."

In 1991, she joined Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow.