Bernard Frois (born January 21, 1943, in Toulouse, France) [1] is a French nuclear physicist, energy policy advisor, and science manager.
Frois received his doctorate in physics from the University of Paris. From 1968 to 2005 he was employed at the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre as a Directeur de recherche (senior scientist) at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). From 2001 to 2005 he was also a Directeur du Département Energie, Transport, Environnement et Ressources naturelles (Director of the Energy, Transport, Environment and Natural Resources Department) in France's Ministère en charge de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche (Ministry in charge of higher education and research). From 2006 to 2010 Frois was a Directeur de Nouvelles Technologies de l'Energie (Director of New Technologies of Energy) of the Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR). From 2011 to the present he has been a scientific advisor for CEA-Liten.
He did considerable research on electron scattering on few-nucleon systems. From nuclear physics he later turned to energy policy and research on energy issues.
Frois was vice-president of the OECD Global Science Forum, chaired the Europe Union's Hydrogen Platform Mirror Group, and served on many international committees. He was a research associate at CERN from 1994 to 1995 and a visiting professor at the University of Utrecht from 1989 to 1990. He held an adjunct professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1987 to 1997. [2] He has served on the Science and Ethics Committee of the Sahara Wind Project. [3]
He is on the governing boards of the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF) and the International Partnership for Hydrogen Economy (IPHE), as well as the board of directors of the European Union's Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking and its successor the Clean Hydrogen Joint Undertaking. [4]
In 1981 Frois was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. [5] In 1987 he was awarded, jointly with Ingo Sick, the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics from the American Physical Society:
"For their elegant studies of nuclei using high-energy electron scattering. In particular, their precision measurements of nuclear charge and current densities have offered novel perspectives on ground states and valence orbitals. Their studies of few-nucleon systems have demonstrated the need for sub-nucleon degrees of freedom in a complete description of the nucleus. This body of work has provided firm benchmarks against which to test our understanding of the nuclear many-body problems." [6]
In 1994 he received the médaille d'argent (silver medal) of the CNRS. In 2002 he was appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre du Mérite by the Ministère de la Recherche.
The neutron is a subatomic particle, symbol
n
or
n0
, which has no electric charge, and a mass slightly greater than that of a proton. Protons and neutrons constitute the nuclei of atoms. Since protons and neutrons behave similarly within the nucleus, they are both referred to as nucleons. Nucleons have a mass of approximately one atomic mass unit, or dalton. Their properties and interactions are described by nuclear physics. Protons and neutrons are not elementary particles; each is composed of three quarks.
Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies atomic nuclei and their constituents and interactions, in addition to the study of other forms of nuclear matter.
Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei, usually deuterium and tritium, combine to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles. The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or absorption of energy. This difference in mass arises due to the difference in nuclear binding energy between the atomic nuclei before and after the reaction. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers active or main-sequence stars and other high-magnitude stars, where large amounts of energy are released.
Robert Hofstadter was an American physicist. He was the joint winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons".
Jean Baptiste Perrin was a French physicist who, in his studies of the Brownian motion of minute particles suspended in liquids, verified Albert Einstein's explanation of this phenomenon and thereby confirmed the atomic nature of matter. For this achievement he was honoured with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1926.
Gargamelle was a heavy liquid bubble chamber detector in operation at CERN between 1970 and 1979. It was designed to detect neutrinos and antineutrinos, which were produced with a beam from the Proton Synchrotron (PS) between 1970 and 1976, before the detector was moved to the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). In 1979 an irreparable crack was discovered in the bubble chamber, and the detector was decommissioned. It is currently part of the "Microcosm" exhibition at CERN, open to the public.
SOLEIL is a synchrotron facility near Paris, France. It performed its first acceleration of electrons on May 14, 2006. The name SOLEIL is a backronym for Source optimisée de lumière d’énergie intermédiaire du LURE, LURE meaning Laboratoire pour l'utilisation du rayonnement électromagnétique.
The Mainz Microtron, abbreviated MAMI, is a microtron which provides a continuous wave, high intensity, polarized electron beam with an energy up to 1.6 GeV. MAMI is the core of an experimental facility for particle, nuclear and X-ray radiation physics at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (Germany). It is one of the largest campus-based accelerator facilities for basic research in Europe. The experiments at MAMI are performed by about 200 physicists of many countries organized in international collaborations.
The NA58 experiment, or COMPASS is a 60-metre-long fixed-target experiment at the M2 beam line of the SPS at CERN. The experimental hall is located at the CERN North Area, close to the French village of Prévessin-Moëns. The experiment is a two-staged spectrometer with numerous tracking detectors, particle identification and calorimetry. The physics results are extracted by recording and analysing the final states of the scattering processes.
CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) is a nuclear and particle physics detector located in the experimental Hall B at Jefferson Laboratory in Newport News, Virginia, United States. It is used to study the properties of the nuclear matter by the collaboration of over 200 physicists from many countries all around the world.
Francisco José Ynduráin Muñoz was a Spanish theoretical physicist. He founded the particle physics research group that became the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid, where he was a Professor. He was described by his colleagues as "a scientist that always searched for excellence in research".
Hot spots in subatomic physics are regions of high energy density or temperature in hadronic or nuclear matter.
Ingo Sick was a Swiss experimental nuclear physicist.
The rms charge radius is a measure of the size of an atomic nucleus, particularly the proton distribution. The proton radius is about one femtometre = 10−15 metre. It can be measured by the scattering of electrons by the nucleus. Relative changes in the mean squared nuclear charge distribution can be precisely measured with atomic spectroscopy.
Ramamurti Rajaraman is an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the School of Physical Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was also the co-Chairman of the International Panel on Fissile Materials and a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board. He has taught and conducted research in physics at the Indian Institute of Science, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and as a visiting professor at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and elsewhere. He received his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1963 from Cornell University. In addition to his physics publications, Rajaraman has written widely on topics including fissile material production in India and Pakistan and the radiological effects of nuclear weapon accidents.
Latifa Elouadrhiri is a Moroccan experimental physicist and researcher at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility studying elementary particle physics and nuclear physics. She has worked significantly with the CLAS collaboration in Jefferson Lab's Hall B, performing 3D imaging of nucleons. Additionally, she is the spokesperson of the Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering (DVCS) experiment, studying Generalized Parton Distributions .
Jean-Bernard Zuber is a French theoretical physicist.
Arthur Kent Kerman was a Canadian-American nuclear physicist, a fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. He was a professor emeritus of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) and Laboratory for Nuclear Science He was known for his work on the theory of the structure of nuclei and on the theory of nuclear reactions.
Trần Thanh Vân, also known as Jean Trần Thanh Vân, is a Vietnamese-French physicist.
Volker D. Burkert is a German physicist, academic and researcher. He is a Principal Staff Scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility at Jefferson Lab (JLab) in Newport News, Virginia (USA). He has made major contributions to the design of the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) that made it suitable for high luminosity operation in experiments studying spin-polarized electron scattering.