Negative Absolute Temperature

January 2019 - April 2019

The capstone course for my undergraduate physics program at BSU required each student to deliver a 20-minute presentation to peers and faculty, as well as submit a research paper on the same topic. Wanting to learn more about something exciting, I chose the phenomenon of negative absolute temperature as my topic.

My first exposure to the theory of negative absolute temperature was in my thermal Physics class from the previous semester. That was the same course where I was introduced to entropy and the formal definition of temperature. Something about the connections between those concepts struck a chord, and so I started making plans for my capstone presentation before the course had even begun!

Both the slides deck for the presentation and the paper are shown below. The paper covers much the same information as the presentation, but with a more detailed analysis of the theory. The paper's abstract provides an explanation of what negative absolute temperature is.