Wick Haxton | |
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Wick C. Haxton (born August 21, 1949, in Santa Cruz, California) is an American theoretical nuclear physicist and astrophysicist. [1] He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. [2] He was appointed a co-editor of the journal Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science as of 2023. [3]
Haxton grew up in Santa Cruz, [4] studied from 1967 at the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA in physics and mathematics 1971) and received his doctorate in 1976 at Stanford University for his work on Semileptonic Weak Interactions in Complex Nuclei (1975). [5] [2]
From 1975 to 1977 he worked at the Institute for Nuclear Physics of the University of Mainz and then until 1985 as Oppenheimer Fellow in the theoretical division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. After a year as assistant professor at Purdue University in 1984 he became associate professor and in 1987 professor at the University of Washington. He remained there as professor of physics and astronomy until 2009, serving from 1991 to 2006 as director of the National Institute for Nuclear Theory (INT). In 2009 he left the University of Washington to become professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. [2] [6] [7]
Haxton is engaged in nuclear astrophysics (supernovae, the solar neutrino problem, nucleosynthesis), neutrino physics (neutrino oscillations, neutrinoless double beta decay, neutrino properties), many-body theory (effective theories) in nuclear physics (as well as in atomic physics and condensed matter physics), and tests of symmetries of fundamental interactions (parity, CP-symmetry, lepton number). [1] [8] Haxton and his colleagues put forward a method for the formulation of an effective field theory for shell model using the harmonic oscillator basis as a regulator. [9] [10] He led the early efforts to convert the Homestake Mine in South Dakota to scientific use as the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, but left the project after the mine was flooded in 2003. [11] [12] [13]
Haxton has been a consultant for Los Alamos National Laboratory, [2] Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, TRIUMF, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and various other laboratories and university facilities over the past two decades. [14]
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1987), [15] and in the 1990s served as chair of the Division of Nuclear Physics and the Division of Astrophysics. [2] He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (1999), [1] and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, [16] the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1988), [2] and the Washington State Academy of Sciences. [17]
He was a Guggenheim Fellow (2000–2001), [18] Visiting Miller Professor at Berkeley (2001), [19] Bethe Lecturer at Cornell University (2001) [6] and received the 2004 Hans Bethe Prize of the American Physical Society for his contributions and scientific leadership in neutrino astrophysics and especially for the connection of nuclear physics theory with experiments and observations in nuclear astrophysics and astrophysics (eulogy). [8]
Frederick Reines was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-detection of the neutrino with Clyde Cowan in the neutrino experiment. He may be the only scientist in history "so intimately associated with the discovery of an elementary particle and the subsequent thorough investigation of its fundamental properties."
Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American theoretical physicist who made major contributions to nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics, and solid-state physics, and who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. For most of his career, Bethe was a professor at Cornell University.
The Cowan–Reines neutrino experiment was conducted by physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines in 1956. The experiment confirmed the existence of neutrinos. Neutrinos, subatomic particles with no electric charge and very small mass, had been conjectured to be an essential particle in beta decay processes in the 1930s. With neither mass nor charge, such particles appeared to be impossible to detect. The experiment exploited a huge flux of electron antineutrinos emanating from a nearby nuclear reactor and a detector consisting of large tanks of water. Neutrino interactions with the protons of the water were observed, verifying the existence and basic properties of this particle for the first time.
John Norris Bahcall was an American astrophysicist and the Richard Black Professor for Astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was known for a wide range of contributions to solar, galactic and extragalactic astrophysics, including the solar neutrino problem, the development of the Hubble Space Telescope and for his leadership and development of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Philip Morrison was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and for his later work in quantum physics, nuclear physics high energy astrophysics, and SETI.
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 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.
Gerson Goldhaber was a German-born American particle physicist and astrophysicist. He was one of the discoverers of the J/ψ meson which confirmed the existence of the charm quark. He worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with the Supernova Cosmology Project, and was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley as well as a professor at Berkeley's graduate school in astrophysics.
Alastair G. W. Cameron was an American-Canadian astrophysicist and space scientist who was an eminent staff member of the Astronomy department of Harvard University. He was one of the founders of the field of nuclear astrophysics, advanced the theory that the Moon was created by the giant impact of a Mars-sized object with the early Earth, and was an early adopter of computer technology in astrophysics.
The Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), or Sanford Lab, is an underground laboratory in Lead, South Dakota. The deepest underground laboratory in the United States, it houses multiple experiments in areas such as dark matter and neutrino physics research, biology, geology and engineering. There are currently 28 active research projects housed within the facility.
Arthur Bruce McDonald, P.Eng is a Canadian astrophysicist. McDonald is the director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration and held the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 2006 to 2013. He was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Japanese physicist Takaaki Kajita.
The Hans A. Bethe Prize, is presented annually by the American Physical Society. The prize honors outstanding work in theory, experiment or observation in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, or closely related fields. The prize consists of $10,000 and a certificate citing the contributions made by the recipient.
Gerald Edward Brown was an American theoretical physicist who worked on nuclear physics and astrophysics. Since 1968 he had been a professor at the Stony Brook University. He was a distinguished professor emeritus of the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University.
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William David Arnett is a Regents Professor of Astrophysics at Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, known for his research on supernova explosions, the formation of neutron stars or black holes by gravitational collapse, and the synthesis of elements in stars; he is author of the monograph Supernovae and Nucleosynthesis which deals with these topics. Arnett pioneered the application of supercomputers to astrophysical problems, including neutrino radiation hydrodynamics, nuclear reaction networks, instabilities and explosions, supernova light curves, and turbulent convective flow in two and three dimensions.
Asoke Nath Mitra was an Indian theoretical physicist. He was a lifetime professor emeritus at Delhi University. He is known for his work in nuclear physics, particle physics and quantum field theory and in particular, for his fundamental contributions in obtaining the exact solution of the nucleon 3- body problem with separable potentials which led to the few nucleon studies, quark-recoil effect, development of an integrated dynamics of 2- and 3- body systems from nucleons to quarks as well as for the development of quark dynamics and relativistic quark models for hadrons in the Bethe-Salpeter framework. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 1969.
Herbert Hwa-sen Chen was a theoretical and experimental physicist at the University of California at Irvine known for his contributions in the field of neutrino detection. Chen's work on observations of elastic neutrino-electron scattering provided important experimental support for the electroweak theory of the standard model of particle physics. In 1984 Chen realized that the deuterium of heavy water could be used as a detector that would distinguish the flavors of solar neutrinos. This idea led Chen to develop plans for the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory that would eventually make fundamental measurements demonstrating that neutrinos were particles with mass.
Robert Graham Hamish Robertson is a Canadian–American experimental physicist, specializing in neutrino physics. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, where he was formerly the director of the University of Washington's Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics.
Probir Roy is an Indian particle physicist and a former professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He is also a senior scientist of the Indian National Science Academy at Bose Institute and a former Raja Ramanna fellow of Department of Atomic Energy at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics.
George Michael Fuller is an American theoretical physicist, known for his research on nuclear astrophysics involving weak interactions, neutrino flavor-mixing, and quark matter, as well as the hypothetical nuclear matter.
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