APS announces prize-winners for 2009
The American Physical Society has announced many of its awards for 2009, naming recipients who work in particle physics and related disciplines, from field theory to relativistic heavy-ion collisions.
Raymond Stora, emeritus director of the Theoretical Physics Laboratory at Annecy-le-Vieux (LAPTH) and a regular visitor to CERN, is one of the four theoreticians who have been honoured with the 2009 Dannie Heineman Prize for mathematical physics. This recognizes the “discovery and exploitation of the BRST symmetry for the quantization of gauge theories providing a fundamental and essential tool for subsequent developments”. He shares the prize with co-workers Carlo Becchi of the University of Genoa and Alain Rouet of Science and Technology, and with Igor Tyutin of the Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow, who worked independently on the same symmetry now known as BRST symmetry. Their work was essential in guaranteeing physical consistency in the quantization of non-Abelian field theories, and it has been valuable in the development of theories of superstrings.
Also in the theoretical physics domain, the J J Sakurai Prize for outstanding achievement in particle theory is awarded to Keith Ellis of Fermilab, Davison Soper of the University of Oregon and John Collins of Pennsylvania State University. They are recognized for “work in perturbative quantum chromodynamics, including applications to problems pivotal to the interpretation of high-energy particle collisions”. While an exact solution of QCD remains elusive, perturbative methods provide valuable approximations in calcuations that have become increasingly precise. In addition to providing a better understanding of QCD, the calculations allow experimenters to separate QCD effects from other phenomena, such as weak and electromagnetic effects.
Experimental work on disentangling the electromagnetic effects of quarks in the proton is recognized in the award of the Tom W Bonner Prize, for outstanding experimental research in nuclear physics, to Robert D McKeown of California Institute of Technology. He receives the prize “for his pioneering work on studying nucleon structure using parity-violating electron scattering, in particular for the first measurement of the strange quark contribution to the electromagnetic structure of the proton”.
The major award in experimental particle physics, the W K H Panofsky Prize, recognizes the importance of precision tracking in measuring the properties of the heavier quarks and the particles that they form. Aldo Menzione of INFN/Pisa and Luciano Ristori of Fermilab are honoured for “their leading role in the establishment and use of precision silicon tracking detectors at hadron colliders, enabling broad advances in knowledge of the top quark, b-hadrons, and charm-hadrons”. Menzione and Ristori’s vision for silicon detectors and their application are now integral to the CDF experiment at Fermilab’s Tevatron collider and have been adapted for other particle detectors worldwide.
Also working on the properties of the top quark at Fermilab, this time with the D0 experiment, Gaston Gutierrez has received the Edward A Bouchet Award for “contributions to the D0 collaboration, in particular the ‘matrix-element’ method of extracting precise measurements of Standard-Model parameters, as well as his outstanding mentorship of young scientists”. He developed this new analysis technique to measure the mass of the top quark.
Discoveries in heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory are recognized by the APS in the award of two prizes established to recognize individuals in the early stages of their career. Brookhaven’s Paul Sorensen received the George E Valley Jr Prize for “his role in the discovery of quark number scaling in the elliptic flow of hadrons in nucleus–nucleus collisions, and its interpretation showing the relevance of quark degrees of freedom in heavy-ion interactions”.
Saskia Mioduszewski of the Cyclotron Institute at Texaz A&M University has received the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award for “her pioneering contributions to the observation of jet quenching and her continuing efforts to understand high-pT phenomena in relativistic heavy-ion collisions”. This award aims to recognize and enhance outstanding achievement by a woman physicist in the early years of her career.
Brookhaven’s achievements with RHIC are also recognized with the award of the Robert R Wilson Prize for Achievement in the Physics of Particle Accelerators to Satoshi Ozaki. He is rewarded for “his outstanding contribution to the design and construction of accelerators that has led to the realization of major machines for fundamental science on two continents, and his promotion of international collaboration”. Ozaki, along with Brookhaven’s Michael Harrison, led the decade-long development and construction of the laboratory’s world class particle accelerator, the RHIC.