Samios receives Gian Carlo Wick award…
The World Federation of Scientists (WFS) has chosen Nicholas Samios, former laboratory director and director of the RIKEN BNL Research Center at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, as the recipient of the 2009 Gian Carlo Wick Gold Medal award, which is given annually to a theoretical physicist for outstanding contributions to particle physics.
Samios was cited "for his visionary role in the successful construction of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and for his intellectual leadership in a series of remarkable experimental discoveries, which established the existence of quark gluon plasma, a new phase of strongly interacting nuclear matter".
The WFS was founded in 1973 in Erici by a group of eminent scientists led by Isidor Isaac Rabi and Antonino Zichichi. Now an association of more than 10,000 scientists from 110 countries, the WFS aims to share knowledge among all nations so that everyone can experience the benefits of scientific progress. The award is named in honour of Gian Carlo Wick (1909–1992), a native of Italy and an eminent theoretical physicist who led the theory group at Brookhaven from 1957 to 1965. Samios will receive the prestigious award on 20 August at a WFS meeting to be held in Erice.
…while Radeka and Sorensen are honoured by IEEE and APS
The Long Island Section of the IEEE has honoured Veljko Radeka, head of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven, with the Harold Wheeler award for "outstanding leadership and accomplishments in detector development, which enabled discoveries in many areas of science and technology in a career of sustained productivity spanning over 50 years".
Radeka and colleagues have developed numerous state-of-the-art detectors that are used in major laboratories around the world. For example, in the 1970s, he worked with Bill Willis to develop liquid-argon calorimeters, which are used at most major particle physics facilities, including CERN. This early work led to Brookhaven's contributing key components to the ATLAS detector in the LHC. Continuing these developments, Radeka and colleagues are working on the technology for large neutrino detectors to be used in the future.
Physicist Paul Sorensen at Brookhaven has received the 2009 George E Valley Jr Prize from the American Physical Society (APS), awarded at the April meeting of the APS in Denver. The prize is awarded biennially to an individual in the early stages of his or her career for an outstanding scientific contribution to physics that is deemed to have significant potential for a dramatic impact in the field. Sorensen was to receive the prize at the April 2009 APS meeting in Denver.
He was recognized for his role in discovering that quarks are important throughout the expansion of the matter created in heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. With his colleagues, he measured the mass, momentum and direction of subatomic particles from data derived from the STAR detector. Sorensen and his collaborators proved that the "perfect" liquid depends on the interactions of quarks, rather than on more obvious properties, such as mass.