Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the American southwest. Best known for its central role in helping develop the first atomic bomb, LANL is one of the world's largest and most advanced scientific institutions.
Louis Alexander Slotin was a Canadian physicist and chemist who took part in the Manhattan Project. Born and raised in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Slotin earned both his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the University of Manitoba, before obtaining his doctorate in physical chemistry at King's College London in 1936. Afterwards, he joined the University of Chicago as a research associate to help design a cyclotron.
Walter Cox McCrone was an American chemist who was considered a leading expert in polarized light microscopy and is sometimes characterized as the "father of modern microscopy". He was also an expert in electron microscopy, crystallography, ultra-microanalysis, and particle identification. He founded the McCrone Research Institute, a non-profit educational and research organization for microscopy based in Chicago.
The Shroud of Turin, also known as the Holy Shroud, is a length of linen cloth bearing the negative image of a man. Some describe the image as depicting Jesus of Nazareth and believe the fabric is the burial shroud in which he was wrapped after crucifixion.
Robert Fox Bacher was an American nuclear physicist and one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project. Born in Loudonville, Ohio, Bacher obtained his undergraduate degree and doctorate from the University of Michigan, writing his 1930 doctoral thesis under the supervision of Samuel Goudsmit on the Zeeman effect of the hyperfine structure of atomic levels. After graduate work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he accepted a job at Columbia University. In 1935 he accepted an offer from Hans Bethe to work with him at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It was there that Bacher collaborated with Bethe on his book Nuclear Physics. A: Stationary States of Nuclei (1936), the first of three books that would become known as the "Bethe Bible".
The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. The White House, following recommendations from participating agencies, confers the awards annually. To be eligible for a Presidential Award, an individual must be a US citizen, national or permanent resident. Some of the winning scientists and engineers receive up to a five-year research grant.
Raymond N. Rogers was an American chemist who was considered a leading expert in thermal analysis. To the general public, however, he was best known for his work on the Shroud of Turin.
Roger D. Jones is an American physicist and entrepreneur. He currently is a Research Fellow at the European Centre for Living Technology at the University of Venice, Italy.
The Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth that tradition associates with the crucifixion and burial of Jesus, has undergone numerous scientific tests, the most notable of which is radiocarbon dating, in an attempt to determine the relic's authenticity. In 1988, scientists at three separate laboratories dated samples from the Shroud to a range of 1260–1390 AD, which coincides with the first certain appearance of the shroud in the 1350s and is much later than the burial of Jesus in 30 or 33 AD. Aspects of the 1988 test continue to be debated. Despite some technical concerns that have been raised about radiocarbon dating of the Shroud, no radiocarbon-dating expert has asserted that the dating is unreliable.
Edward Alan Knapp was an American physicist and was Director of the National Science Foundation from 1982 to 1984.
Los Alamos is a census-designated place in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, United States, that is recognized as the development and creation place of the atomic bomb—the primary objective of the Manhattan Project by Los Alamos National Laboratory during World War II. The town is located on four mesas of the Pajarito Plateau, and had a population of about 13,200 as of 2020. It is the county seat and one of two population centers in the county known as census-designated places (CDPs); the other is White Rock.
Conrad Lee Longmire was an American theoretical physicist who was best known as the discoverer of the mechanism behind high-altitude electromagnetic pulse.
Barbara Jacak is a nuclear physicist who uses heavy ion collisions for fundamental studies of hot, dense nuclear matter. She is Director of the Nuclear Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a professor of Physics at UC Berkeley. Before going to Berkeley, she was a member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University, where she held the rank of Distinguished Professor. She is a leading member of the collaboration that built and operates the PHENIX detector, one of the large detectors that operated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and was involved in the discovery of the quark gluon plasma and its strongly coupled, liquid-like behavior. Throughout her career she has served on many advisory committees and boards including the National Research Council Committee on Nuclear Physics, and the Physical Review C Editorial Board.
Robert Bigham Brode was an American physicist, who during World War II led the group at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory that developed the fuses used in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Raemer Edgar Schreiber was an American physicist from McMinnville, Oregon who served Los Alamos National Laboratory during World War II, participating in the development of the atomic bomb. He saw the first one detonated in the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, and prepared the Fat Man bomb that was used in the bombing of Nagasaki. After the war, he served at Los Alamos as a group leader, and was involved in the design of the hydrogen bomb. In 1955, he became the head of its Nuclear Rocket Propulsion (N) Division, which developed the first nuclear-powered rockets. He served as deputy director of the laboratory from 1972 until his retirement in 1974.
Johndale C. Solem is an American theoretical physicist and Fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Solem has authored or co-authored over 185 technical papers in many different scientific fields. He is known for his work on avoiding comet or asteroid collisions with Earth and on interstellar spacecraft propulsion.
The Shroud of Turin is a length of linen cloth bearing the imprint of the image of a man, and is believed by some to be the burial shroud of Jesus. Despite conclusive scientific evidence that it is of medieval origin, multiple alternative theories about the origin of the shroud dating it to the time of Christ have been proposed.
Jane Elizabeth (Beth) Nordholt is an American physicist known for her work in space science on mass spectrometry of the solar wind and rings of Saturn and the flow of water vapor in the earth's polar wind, and for her work in digital security on devices for quantum key distribution and random number generation. Until her retirement, she worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which in 2006 named her as a Laboratory Fellow.
Laura Beth Smilowitz is an American physicist known for her development of technology that can record x-ray movies of explosions at high frame rates, and for shooting high explosives with lasers in order to synchronize their explosions with their recordings. She is a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she heads the Weapons Chemistry team in the Physical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy group.
Antoinette Jane (Toni) Taylor is an American physicist known for her research on metamaterials and nanophotonics including terahertz metamaterials for controlling and generating submillimeter radiation. She is Associate Laboratory Director, Physical Sciences at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
