Nicholas P. Samios (born March 15, 1932, in NYC) is an American physicist and former director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. [1]
He majored in physics at Columbia College of Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1953; he earned his PhD at Columbia in 1957. He worked on the Columbia faculty for three years before joining Brookhaven's physics department, where he was appointed laboratory director in May 1982. [2] A major achievement of his tenure was the construction of the RHIC, the first heavy-ion collider. [3] He stepped down as director in 1997 after a dispute on leaked radioactivity in the laboratory, but continued to work as a researcher. [4] In 2003 he became director of the RIKEN BNL Research Center. [1]
Samios has specialized in the physics of high-energy particles. He is especially known for his study of elementary particles, in particular for the discovery of the Omega minus particle in 1964 as postulated by Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman, as well as the first charmed baryon. [3] These discoveries have contributed to the understanding of the spectrum of particles and have carried to the formulation of Quantum Chromodynamics and the Standard Model of particle physics. [5]
Ernest Orlando Lawrence was an American nuclear physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. He is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project, as well as for founding the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, New York, a hamlet of the Town of Brookhaven. It was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base on Long Island. Located approximately 60 miles east of New York City, it is managed by Stony Brook University and Battelle Memorial Institute.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located in Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) is a federally funded research and development center in the hills of Berkeley, California, United States. Established in 1931 by the University of California (UC), the laboratory is sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and administered by the UC system. Ernest Lawrence, who won the Nobel prize for inventing the cyclotron, founded the lab and served as its director until his death in 1958. Located in the Berkeley Hills, the lab overlooks the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.
Jack Steinberger was a German-born American physicist noted for his work with neutrinos, the subatomic particles considered to be elementary constituents of matter. He was a recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, for the discovery of the muon neutrino. Through his career as an experimental particle physicist, he held positions at the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University (1950–68), and the CERN (1968–86). He was also a recipient of the United States National Medal of Science in 1988, and the Matteucci Medal from the Italian Academy of Sciences in 1990.
Raymond Davis Jr. was an American chemist and physicist. He is best known as the leader of the Homestake experiment in the 1960s-1980s, which was the first experiment to detect neutrinos emitted from the Sun; for this he shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics is an annual prize of the American Physical Society. It is given to recognize and encourage outstanding achievements in experimental particle physics, and is open to scientists of any nation. It was established in 1985 by friends of Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky and by the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society. Panofsky was a physics professor at Stanford University and the first director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Several of the prize winners have subsequently won the Nobel Prize in Physics. As of 2021, the prize included a $10,000 award.
Melvin Schwartz was an American physicist. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger for their development of the neutrino beam method and their demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.
Maurice Goldhaber was an American physicist, who in 1957 established that neutrinos have negative helicity.
Gian Carlo Wick was an Italian theoretical physicist who made important contributions to quantum field theory. The Wick rotation, Wick contraction, Wick's theorem, and the Wick product are named after him.
The Columbia University Physics Department includes approximately 40 faculty members teaching and conducting research in the areas of astrophysics, high energy nuclear physics, high energy particle physics, atomic-molecular-optical physics, condensed matter physics, and theoretical physics.
David Robert Nygren is a particle physicist known for his invention of the time projection chamber. He is a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Arlington now. He has worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1973. He has been called "the most distinguished developer of particle detection instruments in the country".
The IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award is a Technical Field Award that was established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 2008. This award may be presented for outstanding contributions to the field of nuclear and plasma sciences and engineering. This award may be presented to an individual, individuals on a team, or up to three multiple recipients. Recipients of this award receive a bronze medal, certificate, and honorarium. This award was presented for the first time in 2011.
Wick C. Haxton is an American theoretical nuclear physicist and astrophysicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was appointed a co-editor of the journal Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science as of 2023. In 2024, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Milton Stanley Livingston was an American accelerator physicist, co-inventor of the cyclotron with Ernest Lawrence, and co-discoverer with Ernest Courant and Hartland Snyder of the strong focusing principle, which allowed development of modern large-scale particle accelerators. He built cyclotrons at the University of California, Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During World War II, he served in the operations research group at the Office of Naval Research.
Andrew Marienhoff Sessler was an American physicist, academic, former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (1973–1980), humanitarian and former president (1998) of the American Physical Society.
Sam Aronson is an American physicist, formerly president of the American Physical Society in 2015 and also formerly the director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory from 2006 to 2012.
Maurice René Michel Jacob was a French theoretical particle physicist.
William Joseph Marciano is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in elementary particle physics.
William Chinowsky is an American astrophysicist. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.