Society of Physicists of Macedonia

The Society of Physicists of Macedonia (, Drushtvo na Fizicharite na Republika Makedonija) is a scientific and educational organization established in 1949 in Skopje, Macedonia. It is located at the premises of the Institute of Physics at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the "Ss. Cyril and Methodius" University.
The Society acts as a brokering organization between everyone who works in the field of physics or physical sciences in Macedonia. It also appears as the organizer of the regional (since 1967) and national (since 1957) competitions in physics for primary and secondary schools. Annually more than 500 students join this cycle of competitions and in the end the academic committee assigned by the Society chooses the best four students who comprise the Macedonian delegation to the International Physics Olympiad. The leader of the team is chosen among the Society's members and hitherto this duty was performed by Prof. Dr. Viktor Urumov (1995 - 2011 (leader) and 2014 - present (deputy leader)) and Mr. Stanisha Veljkovikj (2012 - ). Since the first time Macedonia sent a team to IPhO, its representatives have won a bronze medal and five honourable mentions.
The Society of Physicists administers the Biannual Conference of the Society of Physicists of Macedonia, which is often visited by many eminent physicists from various countries. The conferences usually last for three to five days.
Organization.
The Society chooses its presidency and other notable posts among all its members once in two years at the regular annual meetings. The Society is organized to have an executive board, an academic committee (responsible for organizing the physics competitions) and an editorial board (for the Society's publications).
Among the members of the executive board the President, the Secretary and the Treasurer of the Society are elected. The current President of the society is Prof. Dr. Nace Stojanov.
Publications.
The Society published two magazines: "Impuls" (Impulse) and "Macedonian Physics Teacher". But, it has great publication activity in terms of books and studies on different topics.


International Conference on High Energy Physics

ICHEP or International Conference on High Energy Physics is one of the most prestigious international scientific conferences in the field of particle physics, bringing together leading theorists and experimentalists of the world. It was first held in 1950, and is biennial since 1960. Since the first conferences of the series took place in Rochester, New York, the event is also commonly referred to as the Rochester conference.


Ferdinand Brickwedde

Ferdinand Graft Brickwedde (26 March 1903 – 29 March 1989), a physicist at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), in 1931 produced the first sample of hydrogen in which the spectrum of its heavy isotope, deuterium, could be observed. This was a critical step in the discovery of deuterium, for which Brickwedde's collaborator, Harold Urey, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934.
Biography.
He was born on 26 March 1903 in Baltimore, Maryland.
Brickwedde was educated at The Johns Hopkins University, B.A. 1922, M.A. 1924, and Ph.D. 1925. An endowed lectureship in his name is maintained there. In 1925 he joined the National Bureau of Standards as a postdoctoral Mansell Research Associate, was promoted to Chief of its Low Temperature Laboratory in 1926, and became Chief of its Heat and Power Division in 1946.
In 1956, Brickwedde was appointed Dean of the College of Chemistry and Physics at the
Pennsylvania State University. He served in this position until 1963, and then was appointed Evan Pugh Research Professor of Physics Emeritus, in which position he served until his death on 29 March 1989 in Linwood, New Jersey.


Andrei Gritsan

Andrei V. Gritsan is an American-Siberian particle physicist. He was a member of a team of researchers at the Large Hadron Collider, who, in 2012, announced the discovery of a new subatomic particle, a Higgs boson.
Early life and education.
Gritsan was born in Russia and graduated from Novosibirsk State University with his Bachelor of Science degree and Master's degree in physics. He then enrolled at the University of Colorado, Boulder in the United States for his PhD.
Career.
Gritsan joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 2005 after working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Gritsan won both the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development Award and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2007. A few years later, he worked alongside more than 2,000 other scientists and researchers on the Higgs boson which was the recipient of a Nobel Prize in Physics.
In recognition of his "significant contributions to the discovery and to the characterization of the Higgs Boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, and for significant contributions to the measurement of sin2alpha at the SLAC PEP II collider," Gritsan was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.


Ultraviolet divergence

In physics, an ultraviolet divergence or UV divergence is a situation in which an integral, for example a Feynman diagram, diverges because of contributions of objects with unbounded energy, or, equivalently, because of physical phenomena at infinitesimal distances.
Overview.
Since an infinite result is unphysical, ultraviolet divergences often require special treatment to remove unphysical effects inherent in the perturbative formalisms. In particular, UV divergences can often be removed by regularization and renormalization. Successful resolution of an ultraviolet divergence is known as ultraviolet completion. If they cannot be removed, they imply that the theory is not perturbatively well-defined at very short distances.
The name comes from the earliest example of such a divergence, the "ultraviolet catastrophe" first encountered in understanding blackbody radiation. According to classical physics at the end of the nineteenth century, the quantity of radiation in the form of light released at any specific wavelength should increase with decreasing wavelength—in particular, there should be considerably more ultraviolet light released from a blackbody radiator than infrared light. Measurements showed the opposite, with maximal energy released at intermediate wavelengths, suggesting a failure of classical mechanics. This problem eventually led to the development of quantum mechanics.
The successful resolution of the original ultraviolet catastrophe has prompted the pursuit of solutions to other problems of ultraviolet divergence. A similar problem in electromagnetism was solved by Richard Feynman by applying quantum field theory through the use of renormalization groups, leading to the successful creation of quantum electrodynamics (QED). Similar techniques led to the standard model of particle physics. Ultraviolet divergences remain a key feature in the exploration of new physical theories, like supersymmetry.
Proliferation in perturbative theory.
Commenting on the fact that contemporary theories about quantum scattering of fundamental particles grew out of application of the quantization procedure to classical fields that satisfy wave equations, Bjorken and Drell pointed out the following facts about such a procedure which are still as relevant today as in 1965:
The first is that we are led to a theory with differential wave propagation. The field functions are continuous functions of continuous parameters and , and the changes in the fields at a point are determined by properties of the fields infinitesimally close to the point . For most wave fields (for example, sound waves and the vibrations of strings and membranes) such a description is an idealization which is valid for distances larger than the characteristic length which measures the granularity of the medium. For smaller distances these theories are modified in a profound way. The electromagnetic field is a notable exception. Indeed, until the special theory of relativity obviated the necessity of a mechanistic interpretation, physicists made great efforts to discover evidence for such a mechanical description of the radiation field. After the requirement of an “ether” which propagates light waves had been abandoned, there was considerably less difficulty in accepting this same idea when the observed wave properties of the electron suggested the introduction of a new field. Indeed there is no evidence of an ether which underlies the electron wave. However, it is a gross and profound extrapolation of present experimental knowledge to assume that a wave description successful at “large” distances (that is, atomic lengths ≈"10 −8" cm) may be extended to distances an indefinite number of orders of magnitude smaller (for example, to less than nuclear lengths ≈"10 −13" cm). In the relativistic theory, we have seen that the assumption that the field description is correct in arbitrarily small space-time intervals has led—in perturbation theory—to divergent expressions for the electron self-energy and the bare charge. Renormalization theory has sidestepped these divergence difficulties, which may be indicative of the failure of the perturbation expansion. However, it is widely felt that the divergences are symptomatic of a chronic disorder in the small-distance behaviour of the theory. We might then ask why local field theories, that is, theories of fields which can be described by differential laws of wave propagation, have been so extensively used and accepted. There are several reasons, including the important one that with their aid a significant region of agreement with observations has been found. But the foremost reason is brutally simple: there exists no convincing form of a theory which avoids differential field equations.


Herbert Wagner (physicist)

Herbert Wagner (born 6 April 1935) is a German theoretical physicist, who mainly works in statistical mechanics. He is a professor emeritus of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Biography.
Wagner was one of the last students of German theoretical physicist and Nobel prize winner Werner Heisenberg, with whom he worked on magnetism.
As a postdoc at Cornell University, he and David Mermin (and independently of Pierre Hohenberg) proved a "no-go theorem", otherwise known as the Mermin–Wagner theorem. The theorem states that continuous symmetries cannot be spontaneously broken at finite temperature in systems with sufficiently short-range interactions in dimensions formula_1.
Wagner is the academic father of a generation of statistical physicists. Many of his students and junior collaborators now occupy chairs in German universities, including
Hans Werner Diehl (Essen),
 (Wuppertal, then Max-Planck-Institut für Metallforschung Stuttgart),
Gerhard Gompper (Forschungszentrum Jülich),
Reinhard Lipowsky (Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Berlin),
Hartmut Löwen (Düsseldorf),
Klaus Mecke (Erlangen),
and Udo Seifert (Stuttgart).
Awards.
In 1992, Wagner was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Essen (now University of Duisburg-Essen). In 2016 he received the Max Planck Medal for his fundamental works on the statistical physics of low-dimensional systems.


William F. Hoffmann

William F. Hoffmann is a physicist in the University of Arizona who was awarded the status of Fellow from the American Physical Society after they were nominated by their Division of Astrophysics in 1997, for "his pioneering work in the field of balloon-borne far-infrared astronomy and discovery of far-infrared radiation from Galactic Center; successful construction of the Multi Mirror Telescope (MMT) and application of infrared array technology to astronomy."


Arthur F. Hebard

Arthur Foster Hebard (born 2 March 1940) is Distinguished Professor of Physics at University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He is particularly noted for leading the discovery of superconductivity in Buckminsterfullerene in 1991.
Art Hebard attended The Hotchkiss School and graduated with a BA in Physics from Yale University in 1962. He obtained his PhD from Stanford University in 1971 under William M. Fairbank with thesis "Search for fractional charge using low temperature techniques". After a spell as a Research Associate at Stanford, he became a member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories. He moved to the University of Florida as a Professor in 1996, and in 2007 was given the title of Distinguished Professor.
He is the author of more than 250 refereed scientific publications and 90 invited presentations, and has been issued 10 patents. He was awarded the 2008 James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials by the American Physical Society, and a co-recipient of the 2015 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize
, also given by the American Physical Society, "For discovery and pioneering investigations of the superconductor-insulator transition, a paradigm for quantum phase transitions."
His research interests include thin-film physics, graphene, fullerenes and fullerene derived compounds, superconductivity, dilute magnetic semiconductors, magnetism in thin films and at thin film interfaces, interface capacitance, magnetocapacitance of complex oxides and semiconductors. Notable recent work has been on the use of graphene for solar cells.
In 2017, Art Hebard was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
He was married to the late Caroline Hebard and has four children and six grandchildren.


Karin M. Rabe

Karin M. Rabe (born 1961) is an American condensed matter physicist known for her studies of ferroelectric materials, multiferroics, and martensites. She is a distinguished professor and Board of Governors Professor of physics at Rutgers University.
Education and career.
Rabe graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1982, with a bachelor's degree in physics. She completed her Ph.D. in 1987 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; her dissertation "Ab initio Statistical Mechanics of Structural Phase Transitions" was supervised by John Joannopoulos.
After postdoctoral research at AT&T Bell Laboratories, she joined Yale University as Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and Physics in 1989. She became full professor at Yale in 1999, and moved to Rutgers in 2000. At Rutgers, her doctoral students have included 2013 MacArthur "Genius" Award winner Craig Fennie.
Rabe also chairs the board of the Aspen Center for Physics.
Recognition.
Rabe was named Board of Governors Professor by Rutgers in 2013.
In 2002, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), after a nomination from the APS Division of Materials Physics "for fundamental contributions to the development and application of theoretical and computational methods for the study of structural phase transitions in solids". Rabe won the David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Materials Physics for 2008 "for research, writings and presentations on the theory of structural phase transitions and for the application of first-principles electronic structure methods to the understanding of technologically important phenomena in ferroelectrics".
She was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011, and elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.


House of Abdus Salam, Jhang

The House of Abdus Salam () is a Pakistani national monument. It housed Pakistani Professor Abdus Salam, a theoretical physicist who became the first Muslim and Pakistani to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979.
Location.
The monument is located in Jhang, Punjab, Pakistan.
Protection.
After the Pakistani 18th Constitutional Amendment, most of the archaeological sites and national monuments were devolved to the provinces. The monuments transferred to the Punjab Archaeology Department included Abdus Salam's house, and funding and conservation initiatives were taken by the archaeology department.


Enrico Persico

Enrico Persico (August 9, 1900 – June 17, 1969) was an Italian physicist notable for propagating the field of quantum mechanics in Italy. He was a professor at the University of Turin and is also notable as the doctoral advisor of Ugo Fano.
Career.
Persico was born in Rome on 9 August 1900. During his university years his friendship with Enrico Fermi intensified. He graduated in 1921. In 1926 he was already teaching physics at the University of Rome, and co-authored with Fermi on the topic of wave mechanics. He then moved to Florence, where he organized lectures on wave mechanics. At the end of 1930 he was called to Turin. From Turin he maintained relationships with Fermi. He was a witness to the discovery of the slowing down of neutrons and recorded results of the readings of the counters used by Fermi in order to measure the activity induced by neutrons in particles of silver, with and without the presence of paraffin. In the autumn of the 1949 Persico, discouraged from the oppressive atmosphere of the post-war period, accepted a position in Canada, taking the place of Franco Rasetti. In the autumn of 1950 he returned to Rome, to take up the advanced Physical Chair. He continued an interest in optoelectronics, an area that had already cultivated in Canada. In the 1953 Persico directed the theoretical work that underpinned the construction of a 1.1 GeV synchrotron. He also developed the general theory of loaded particle injection in particle accelerators.


Jane English

Jane English (born 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a philosopher, physicist, photographer, journalist and translator.
Biography.
English received her B.A. in Physics from Mount Holyoke College in 1964 and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison for her work in high energy particle physics. She taught courses in Oriental thought and modern physics at Colorado College.
English collaborated on a translation of the "Tao Te Ching" of Lao Tsu which she illustrated through photography, in collaboration with her spouse Gia-Fu Feng.
Philosophy.
English is the best-known proponent of the "friendship theory" in the philosophy of filial obligation. This is the view that we do not, contrary to popular opinion, owe our parents anything simply by virtue of being raised by them, because they made a choice to have us as children and all the effects of this choice should have been considered by them: they are merely fulfilling their immediate decision by raising us. We were unable to enter into any contract with our parents when we were being conceived, and so the decision is entirely theirs. English models a perspective that states that parents should be like friends to us: people that we choose to have a relationship with without any obligation. However, if we do not wish to be friends with them, then this is our choice and we are perfectly justified in choosing thus if we so wish.


Yuen-Ron Shen

Yuen-Ron Shen () is a Chinese physicist. He is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, known for his work on non-linear optics. He was born in Shanghai and graduated from National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard under physicist and Nobel Laureate Nicolaas Bloembergen in 1963, and joined the department of physics at Berkeley in 1964. In the early years, Shen was probably best known for his work on self-focusing and filament propagation of laser beams in materials. These fundamental studies enabled the creation of ultrafast supercontinuum light sources. In the 1970s and 1980s, he collaborated with Yuan T. Lee on the study of multiphoton dissociation of molecular clusters. The molecular-beam photofragmentation translational spectroscopy that they developed has clarified much of the initial confusion concerning the dynamics of infrared multiphoton dissociation processes. In the 1980s and 1990s, Shen developed various nonlinear optics methods for the study of material surfaces and interfaces. Among these techniques, second-harmonic generation and sum frequency generation spectroscopy are best known and now widely used by scientists from various fields. He has collaborated with Gabor Somorjai on the use of the technique of Sum Frequency Generation Spectroscopy to study catalyst surfaces. He is the author of the book "The Principles of Nonlinear Optics". Shen belongs to the prolific J. J. Thomson academic lineage tree. Currently, Shen works in U. C. Berkeley and Fudan University in Shanghai.


Linda Young (scientist)

Linda Young is a distinguished fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and a professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Physics and James Franck Institute. Young is also the former director of Argonne’s X-ray Science Division.
Young is an expert in the field of X-ray science. For her contributions to the field, The Helmholtz Association—Germany’s largest scientific organization—awarded Young the Helmholtz International Fellow Award in 2017. Young is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and has served on multiple scientific advisory boards. She currently chairs the scientific advisory committee for the Photon Science Directorate of the Paul Scherrer Institute and has previously served on the European XFEL, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, and DESY Scientific Councils.
Early life and education.
Young earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981, and her bachelor of science degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. After completing her post-doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, Young joined Argonne’s Physics Division. From 1994 until 2010, Young led the AMO Physics Group within the laboratory, and from 2009 until 2015, she directed Argonne’s X-ray Science Division.
Major research contributions.
Ultra-Intense X-ray interactions.
Young has worked extensively on understanding x-ray atom interactions in the ultrahigh intensity regime provided by x-ray free-electron lasers. She led the first scientific experiment at the Linac Coherent Light Source—the world’s first hard x-ray free electron laser—and has co-authored multiple studies that have established the dominant multiphoton and nonlinear x-ray interaction mechanisms with atoms. Young also investigates the electron dynamics driven by X-ray free-electron lasers (XFEL); understanding transient electron configurations within XFEL-irradiated samples is critical to single-shot x-ray imaging applications.
X-ray Photoionization & Inner Shell processes.
Young has conducted research to understand and control x-ray photoionization and inner-shell processes, including non-dipole photoionization Compton Double ionization Rayleigh vs Compton Scattering double K-photoionization x-ray probes of optical strong-field processes optical control of X-ray absorption via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT)-like phenomena and X-ray pump/X-ray probe studies of inner-shell dynamics.
Ultrastable, High-Repetition Rate Pump-Probe X-ray Studies.
Young has worked with Argonne’s AMO Physics Group and other collaborators on developing an ultrastable, high-repetition rate, widely tunable, polarized picosecond X-ray pump/probe capabilities. These developments will enable researchers to track laser-controlled molecular dynamics in condensed phases with specificity.
Atom Trap Trace Analysis (ATTA).
Young was part of the research team that developed the Atom Trap Trace Analysis (ATTA) methodology for counting atoms of rare isotopes whose isotopic abundances are less than one part in a trillion. ATTA is a tool that extends radiocarbon dating from 5000 yr to 200 kyr, operating on long-lived isotopes where radioactive decay counting is inefficient. ATTA has been used with 81Kr to date the groundwater of ancient aquifers.


Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

Nancy Thorndike Greenspan is an American author specializing in biographies. She is known for writing the biography of notable physicist Max Born"," "The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born: The Nobel Physicist Who Ignited the Quantum Revolution."
She also authored several books in child psychiatry and psychology with her husband, Stanley I. Greenspan. These include "The Clinical Interview of the Child," McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1981, 3rd edition, American Psychiatric Press (Washington, DC), 2003, "First Feelings: Milestones in the Emotional Development of Your Baby and Child," Viking (New York, NY), 1985, and "The Essential Partnership: How Parents and Children Can Meet the Emotional Challenges of Infancy and Childhood," Viking (New York, NY), 1989.
She is also known for writing the biography of WWII spy Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist and Nazi resister who was a WWII spy. The biography, "Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs (Viking, May 12, 2020)" is a non-fictional account of how the spy risked extreme torture and death by the Gestapo to fight the Nazis in 1932-33 and handing the plans for the plutonium bomb to the Russians in 1945, which ultimately resulted in the Cold War between 1947-91.
She has served on the board of numerous environmental organizations and is a board member of the American Institute of Physics Foundation.
Reception.
In his 2005 review of Greenspan's book "The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born: The Nobel Physicist Who Ignited the Quantum Revolution", David C. Cassidy ("Biography," fall, 2005, David C. Cassidy, review of "The End of the Certain World," p. 372) wrote "It is a powerful story" and it "is well told".
The book's review in "Publishers Weekly" wrote "This empathetic work, Greenspan's first solo effort, lifts a deserving figure out of semi-obscurity and adds a valuable perspective on the origin of modern physics."
The book's review in "Science News" said the "book will appeal to anyone interested in the golden age of physics, as Born was one of its most influential figures."


Vladimir Broude

Vladimir L'vovich Broude (December 1, 1924, Moscow, Russia – June 22, 1978, Chernogolovka, Russia), was a Soviet experimental physicist of Jewish descent. His father was a Professor of biochemistry and his mother was a medical doctor. His elder brother Evgenii was conscripted soon after beginning of the Nazi invasion in June 1941 and lost his life.
Career.
In 1947 Broude graduated from the Moscow Institute of Chemical Engineering and was directed to Kiev, Ukraine, to the Institute of Physics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, for developing and installing equipment for low-temperature optical spectroscopy. Here he developed interest in the low-temperature spectroscopy, studied quantum mechanics and group theory, and very soon became an active and inventive experimental physicist.
In his first break-through papers Broude discovered in the low-temperature spectra of crystalline benzine a triplet of absorption bands strongly polarized along the crystallographic axes. Methodically, this success was only possible thanks to a breakthrough in experimental techniques, the invention of a microprocessor that allowed taking spectra of minor crystallites in polarized light. This experimental result also was of crucial scientific importance because it provided a firm scientific ground for identification strongly polarized absorption bands in the spectra of molecular crystals with exciton . For these reasons, Broude' papers of the spectra of benzine nearly immediately became the classics.
The next great achievement of Broude was developing a technique for getting the information on energy spectra of excitons in perfect crystals from optical spectra of isotopic solutions. This started with the spectra of dilute solutions in which the giant oscillator strength of impurity excitons was identified and the position of lower energy band of crystalline naphthalene was established. Afterwards the technique was generalized to exciton spectra of mixed crystals in a wide range of concentrations. This resulted in the discovery of the multimode regime in the impurity-exciton bands of disordered systems. Isototic technique initiated by Broude found application in investigations of energy transport in biological systems.
In 1966 Broude moved to Chernogolovka (Moscow district) to a newly established Institute of Solid State Physics (Russia) where he founded a Laboratory of optics and spectroscopy.
Broude was a co-recipient of the 1966 Lenin prize for discovery of excitons.


Helen Quinn

Helen Rhoda Arnold Quinn (born 19 May 1943) is an Australian-born particle physicist and educator who has made major contributions to both fields. Her contributions to theoretical physics include the Peccei–Quinn theory which implies a corresponding symmetry of nature (related to matter-antimatter symmetry and the possible source of the dark matter that pervades the universe) and contributions to the search for a unified theory for the three types of particle interactions (strong, electromagnetic, and weak). As Chair of the Board on Science Education of the National Academy of Sciences, Quinn led the effort that produced "A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas"—the basis for the Next Generation Science Standards adopted by many states. Her honours include the Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics, the Oskar Klein Medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, appointment as an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia, the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics from the American Physical Society, the Karl Taylor Compton Medal for Leadership in Physics from the American Institute of Physics, and the 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics from the Franklin Institute.
Life.
Quinn grew up in Australia and graduated in 1959 from Tintern Grammar, Tintern Church of England Girls' Grammar School, in Ringwood East, Victoria, Australia. She began college at the University of Melbourne before moving to the United States and transferring to Stanford University. She received her PhD from Stanford in 1967, at a time when less than 2% of physicists were women. She did her postdoctoral work at the DESY (the German Synchrotron Laboratory) in Hamburg, Germany. She next spent seven years at Harvard University before returning to Stanford, where she became a professor of physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC). She retired in 2010 and devoted her efforts to education, especially K-12 and preschool science and multilingual education. She and her husband raised two children and have three grandchildren.
Professional contributions.
Working with Howard Georgi and Steven Weinberg, Quinn showed how the three types of particle interactions (strong, electromagnetic, and weak), which look very different as we see their impact in the world around us, become very similar in extremely high-energy processes and so might be three aspects of a single unified force.
With Roberto Peccei, she originated Peccei–Quinn theory, which suggested a possible near-symmetry of the universe (now known as Peccei–Quinn symmetry) to explain how strong interactions can maintain CP-symmetry (the symmetry between matter and antimatter) when weak interactions do not. One consequence of this theory is a particle known as the axion which has yet to be observed but is one candidate for the dark matter that pervades the universe.
She showed how the physics of quarks can be used to predict certain aspects of the physics of hadrons (which are particles made from quarks) regardless of the details of the hadron's structure (with Enrico Poggio and Steven Weinberg). This useful property is now known as quark-hadron duality.
She has given public talks in various countries on "The Missing Antimatter", in which she suggests that this area of research is promising.
In 2001, she was elected to become President of the American Physical Society for the year 2004. She was the fourth woman to be elected to the APS presidential line in the Society's 102-year history.
Quinn has had a long term engagement in education issues. She was a cofounder and the first president of the Contemporary Physics Education Project, and helped design its first product, the chart of Fundamental Particles and Interactions that appears on many schoolhouse walls next to the periodic table chart. CPEP received the 2017 "Excellence in Physics Education Award" from the American Physical Society, "for leadership in providing educational materials on contemporary physics topics to students for over 25 years."
She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) while she was a staff member at SLAC; she was soon made a full Professor of Physics at Stanford. As a member of NAS, she joined the Board on Science Education of the National Research Council and has served on a number of its studies. She served as Chair of this Board for the years 2009-14.
After retiring from Stanford, she spent her full effort on education. She planned and led the work of the NRC study committee that produced "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" to guide the development of multi-state standards for science education. These "Next Generation Science Standards" were released in final form in April, 2013. NGSS has been officially adopted by many states and the District of Columbia. Since the release of the Framework, she has worked to support the ongoing process of development, adoption, and implementation of the NGSS. With Okhee Lee and Guadalupe Valdez, she studied the opportunities for teaching English to English language learners in the context of NGSS.
In 2015, the President of Ecuador appointed her as a member of the board (Comision Gestora) charged with leading the new National University of Education.
Career.
Her professional career is as follows:


Alpha nuclide

An alpha nuclide is a nuclide that consists of an integer number of alpha particles. Alpha nuclides have equal, even numbers of protons and neutrons; they are important in stellar nucleosynthesis since the energetic environment within stars is amenable to fusion of alpha particles into heavier nuclei. Stable alpha nuclides, and stable decay products of radioactive alpha nuclides, are some of the most common metals in the universe.
Alpha nuclide is also shorthand for "alpha radionuclide," referring to those radioactive isotopes that undergo alpha decay and thereby emit alpha particles.
List of alpha nuclides.
The nuclear binding energy of alpha nuclides heavier than zinc-60 (beginning with germanium-64) is too large for them be formed by fusion processes. , the heaviest known alpha nuclide is xenon-108.


Gerd Buschhorn

Gerd W. Buschhorn (21 June 1934 – 20 January 2010) is the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics.


Luisa Cifarelli

Luisa Cifarelli FInstP (born 11 June 1952) is a Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Bologna. She is the Director of the La Rivista del Nuovo Cimento.
Early life and education.
Cifarelli was born in Rome in 1952. She studied physics at the University of Bologna and graduated in 1975. She worked as a researcher in at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare and CERN. She edited the collection of scientific studies for the publication "QCD at 200 TeV". In 1988 she was made an associate professor at .
Career.
Cifarelli was appointed full Professor at the University of Pisa in 1991. She moved to the University of Salerno in 1993. She works at CERN, the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, DESY and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare. She has been involved in the design and construction of the ALICE experiment, which studies proton-proton and nucleus-nucleus collisions at extreme energies. She was made Head of the ALICE Data Analysis and Simulation Group in 2000. She served as Deputy Chairperson of the time of flight experiment at ALICE. She used the ALICE experiment to study quark-gluon interactions. She coordinates the Extreme Energy Events experiments, which uses muon detectors in high schools around Italy to study cosmic swarms. She serves on the DarkSide project; a 20 tonne Two-Phase LAr TPC for Direct Dark Matter Detection at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso.
In 2008, Cifarelli was the first woman to be made President of the Italian Physical Society in 2008. That year she was also elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. In 2011 she was appointed President of the European Physical Society. Cifarelli was the first woman to be elected president of the European Physical Society. She was made President of the Enrico Fermi Center for Study and Research. She has spoken about the life of Enrico Fermi extensively. Cifarelli has acted as editor of the European Physical Journal. She serves on the editorial board of Elsevier's Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research.


German Physical Society

The German Physical Society (German: , DPG) is the oldest organisation of physicists. The DPG's worldwide membership is cited as 60,547, as of 2019, making it the largest physics society in the world. It holds an annual conference () and multiple spring conferences (), which are held at various locations and along topical subjects of given sections of the DPG.
The DPG serves the fields of pure and applied physics. Main aims are to bring its members and all physicists living in Germany closer together, represent their entirety outwards as well as foster the exchange of ideas between its members and foreign colleagues. The DPG binds itself and its members to advocate for freedom, tolerance, veracity and dignity in science and to be aware about the fact that the people working in science are responsible to a particularly high extent for the configuration of the overall human activity.
Conferences and fostering young talent.
The DPG itself does not carry out any research, but its conferences promote the sharing of information about the latest findings in the field of physics. The traditional spring meetings held by the DPG each year at venues across the country are among largest physics conferences in Europe, attended by around 10,000 experts from Germany and abroad. Fostering young talent is another central concern of the DPG : its conferences provide a platform particularly for younger scientists. The conferences provide students with opportunities to meet renowned scientists in person. The DPG also runs a nationwide network for physics students in the working group Young DPG. Female physicists have a forum of their own in the annual German Conference of Women in Physics.
Awards and school projects.
The DPG honours outstanding achievements in physics with awards of international repute. The highest awards which are presented by the DPG are the Max Planck Medal for work in theoretical physics, first awarded in 1929, and the Stern–Gerlach Medal for work in experimental physics, first awarded in 1933. Some awards, such as the Gustav Hertz Prize for Young Physicists, intend to foster young talent. Others are awarded by the DPG in cooperation with other organisations in Germany and abroad, such as the Max Born Medal and Prize or the Otto Hahn Prize. The Medal for Natural Science Journalism is awarded by the DPG to personalities who have made a special contribution to bringing scientific facts to the attention of the general public. In addition, the DPG awards prizes to school graduates throughout the country for outstanding achievements in physics. It supports competitions for school students such as the (national research contest for young scientists), promotes innovative school projects and organises advanced training courses for teaching staff.
Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics.
Since 2002, the (Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division) recognizes "outstanding original contributions that use physical methods to develop a better understanding of socio-economic problems".
Awardees are Vittoria Colizza (2013), Arne Traulsen (2012), Santo Fortunato (2011), Dirk Brockmann (2010), Duncan Watts (2009), Fabrizio Lillo (2008), Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron (2007) for the Sznajd model, Xavier Gabaix (2006), Reuven Cohen (2005), Illes Farkas (2004), Vasliki Plerou (2002) and Damien Challet (2002).
Publications.
The DPG produces a range of various publications. The membership journal of the DPG provides news reports from the DPG and about physics in general. Besides, the DPG joins forces with the British Institute of Physics to publish the electronic open access journal "New Journal of Physics". The articles published here have gone through a strict peer review in line with the stringent scientific quality standards propounded by the "New Journal of Physics". Moreover, the DPG also publishes its conference programme every year under the name (Programme Booklets for DPG Conferences), listing the abstracts of around 8,000 papers. And the web portal www.welt-der-physik.de, operated jointly by the DPG and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), provides much information about physics even for nonexperts.
Historical publications.
Publications of the DPG have included:
From the time of its creation in 1845, the DPG published and its , but by 1919, the had become too voluminous, so DPG chairman Arnold Sommerfeld formed a committee consisting of Albert Einstein, Eugen Goldstein, Fritz Haber, E. Jahnke, Karl Scheel, and Wilhelm Westphal, which recommended that a new journal, the , should be established for rapid publication of original research articles by established scientists without peer review; it began publication the following year. In 1975 was merged with "Physics of Condensed Matter" (). was published as a 4-part journal from 1920–1997 by Springer-Verlag under the auspices of the DPG. During the early 20th century, it was considered one of the most prestigious journals in physics, with its golden years coinciding with the golden years of quantum mechanics.
It was the vehicle used by those with avant-garde views and the young generation of quantum physicists in the 1920s.
Physics and public relations.
The DPG plays an active role in the dialogue between science and the general public with a range of popular scientific publications, physics outreach, and public events. These activities also include the Highlights of Physics, an annual physics festival organised jointly by the DPG and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. It is the largest festival of its kind in Germany with around 30,000 visitors every year.
Studies and social commitment.
The DPG engages in socio-political discussions by releasing press statements, carrying out studies, giving statements and attending parliamentary evenings. It deals with current issues such as fostering young talent, climate protection, energy supply or arms control through to science and cultural history issues. The DPG is very particularly committed to equal opportunities for men and women and to promote women in natural sciences.
In Bonn and Berlin.
The DPG office headed by the Chief Executive Bernhard Nunner is located in the (physics conference centre in Bad Honnef), in the neighbourhood of the university and federal city of Bonn. The is not only a meeting place and discussion forum of outstanding significance for physics in Germany but also an international brand for the discipline of physics. Students and cutting edge scientists through to Nobel Prize winners meet here to share their thoughts and ideas on a scientific level. Teaching staffs also gladly come to Bad Honnef time and again to attend advanced training courses relating to pure physics and the didactic aspects of this discipline, in the seminars held by the DPG. The DPG is also present in Germany's capital Berlin. It has been running the Magnus-Haus in Berlin since its reunification with the Physical Society of East Germany in 1990. This urban palace completed in 1760 – bearing the name of the natural scientist Gustav Magnus – has close links to the history of the DPG: it was the regular meeting place of scholars during the 19th century that eventually resulted in the Physical Society of Berlin being founded in 1845, which later became the DPG. Today it is a venue for meetings and lectures on physical and socio-political issues. The Magnus-Haus is also home to the DPG's historical archive.
Under National Socialism.
The DPG was in opposition to National Socialism's persecution of the Jews in general, and their promotion of , in particular. On 7 April 1933, barely two months after Adolf Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, was passed; under this law, Jewish civil servants and regime opponents were removed from their jobs. These policies had significant effects on physics in Germany through significant qualitative and quantitative losses of physicists as a result of emigration and through political decisions overriding those based on academic and scientific considerations; 25% of the physicists holding academic positions in the period 1932–1933 were lost due to the policies. The opposition can be illustrated by just a few examples, such as the DPG not immediately dismissing Jews after passage of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, Max von Laue's address at the opening of the 1933 physics convention in Würzburg, opposition to Johannes Stark exercising the in attempting to become the dictator of physics, and Carl Ramsauer's opposition to the politicization of education:
Reunification.
After the conclusion of World War II, in 1946, von Laue initiated the founding of the in only the British Zone, as the Allied Control Council would not initially allow organizations across occupation zone boundaries. The DPG was eventually also reinstituted individually in the American and French sectors. These individually established organizations were united in West Germany in 1950, only after the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany on 23 May 1949. It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the DPG again fully unified across Germany.


Earl W. McDaniel

Earl W. (Wadsworth) McDaniel (April 15, 1926 – May 4, 1997) was a Regents Professor of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Georgia Tech Research Institute and is most noted for his contributions to the field of ion mobility spectrometry.
Education and early career.
After completing his undergraduate degree in physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and earning his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Earl was recruited by Georgia Tech Research Institute director James Boyd to return to Georgia Tech as an assistant professor. He received appointments in both the School of Physics and the School of Electrical Engineering.
Apart from his work as a physicist, Dr. McDaniel was known to be an avid reader of both fiction and classics as well as an expert on the histories of great military conflicts and battles.
Drift tube.
In 1964, Earl began construction of a "drift tube" with the help of mechanical engineering student, Dan Albritton. Using this drift tube the pair revolutionized the field of ion transport. Their publication "Mobilities of Mass-Identified H3+ and H+ Ions in Hydrogen" was chosen as one of the top 100 papers ever published in the journal "Physical Review".
Publications.
Aside from a number of popular research publications, Dr. McDaniel also authored or edited 8 books. Among these, the most notable were "Collision Phenomena in Ionized Gases," “Transport Properties of Ions in Gases,” "Atomic Collisions: Electron and Photon Projectiles,” and “Atomic Collisions: Heavy Particle Projectiles.” These books were published in a number of countries and translated into multiple languages.


Maria Girone

Maria Girone is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the CERN openlab. She leads the development of High Performance Computing (HPC) technologies for particle physics experiments.
Early life and education.
Girone studied physics at the University of Bari. She earned her doctoral degree in particle physics in 1994. She soon became a research fellow on the ALEPH experiment, supporting analysis and acting as liaison for the accelerator. She was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship and joined Imperial College London, where she worked on the hardware development for both the LHCb and ALEPH experiments.
Career and research.
CERN openlab was established in 2001 and supports academics at CERN in their collaborations with independent companies. Girone moved into scientific computing in 2002, working for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). The WLCG stores, shares and assists in the analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider where she developed a persistence framework. The WLCG is the largest assembly of computing resources ever collected for a scientific endeavour. In the Large Hadron Collider experiment detectors there are around one billion beam collisions per second. WLCG analyses billions of beam crossings and tries to predict the detector response.
In 2009, whilst at the WLCG, Girone founded and led the Operations Coordinations team. She was appointed coordinator of the software and computing for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) in 2014. In this capacity, she was responsible for the operation of seventy computing centres across five different continents. She joined CERN openlab as chief technology officer (CTO) in 2016.
She has worked on the upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider), which will require up to one hundred times more computing capacity than it did originally. This increase in capacity will come through access to commercial cloud computing platforms, data analytics, deep learning and new computing architectures.


S-factor

In nuclear physics, the astrophysical S-factor is a rescaling of a nuclear reaction's total cross section to account for the Coulomb repulsion between the charged reactants. It determines the rates of nuclear fusion reactions that occur in the cores of stars.
Definition.
The quantity is defined as
Here, is the dimensionless Sommerfeld parameter,
where
Motivation.
The Coulomb barrier causes the cross section to have a strong exponential dependence on the center-of-mass energy . The S-factor remedies this by factoring out the Coulomb component of the cross section.


Research Letters in Physics

Research Letters in Physics is an open-access scientific journal publishing short (up to 4 pages) papers in the broad field of physics. The journal was established in 2007 and is published by the Hindawi Publishing Corporation. It ceased publications in 2017.
Abstracting and indexing.
The journal is abstracted and indexed in Academic OneFile, Academic Search Premier, Chemical Abstracts, EBSCO databases, InfoTrac, INSPEC, International Nuclear Information System, and Scopus.


European Muon Collaboration

The European Muon Collaboration (EMC) was formed in 1973 to study the interactions of high energy muons at CERN. These experiments were motivated by the interest in determining the quark structure of the nucleon following the discovery of high levels of deep inelastic scattering at SLAC.
In 1972 two muon beams were proposed for the then new Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) machine. One by Roger Clifft and Erwin Gabathuler and one by Friedhelm Brasse and Joerg Gayler. The two teams came together to design a high intensity muon beam of energy up to 280 GeV to do the experiments. The collaboration, which became known as the European Muon Collaboration (EMC), was formed around these people to carry out the experiments. A proposal for the beam and an apparatus to do the experiments was submitted to CERN in 1974 (the White Book). The experiments were approved and the apparatus was built between the years 1974–78. The collaboration grew in size to about 100 physicists. This was among the largest experimental collaborations at the time.
Several experiments were performed. Each experiment is denoted by a number NAxx where NA is for North Area experiments approved by CERN and xx is the number given to it by CERN.
EMC experiments.
NA2 : Electromagnetic interactions of muons.
NA2 was a single magnet spectrometer to measure the forward production products of deep inelastic scattering by muons. Data were taken for this experiment in the years between 1978–1981.
NA9 : Study of final states in deep inelastic muon scattering.
For this experiment a second magnet containing a streamer chamber was added upstream of the NA2 apparatus to detect and measure the products of the deep inelastic scattering reactions at wider angles. Further groups joined the EMC for these experiments and the collaboration grew to about 150 physicists. The experiments were performed between 1981–1983.
NA28 : Study of shadowing and hadron production in high energy µ scattering using nuclear targets.
During the NA9 phase, a state of the art (at the time) processor was installed by the University of Uppsala group to trigger on scattered muons at very small angles to the beam (this was the NA28 experiment). This experiment was designed to investigate shadowing in nuclei.
From 1984–1985 the experiment reverted to the single magnet spectrometer of NA2 and a large polarized target together with subsidiary nuclear targets were installed.
Major results of the experiments.
The first results of the NA2 phase of the experiment showed that charm production was mediated by the photon-gluon fusion process. The collaboration then went on to show that the scattering rate in iron and deuterium were different. This showed that the quark sub-structure of nucleons bound in nuclei is different from that of free nucleons. The effect became known as the EMC effect and aroused great interest among theoretical physicists. It was planned to replace the iron, deuterium and hydrogen targets with a polarized target in 1981. However, it proved to be difficult to build the large volume target necessary and this experiment was postponed until 1984. In addition the Lund model of quark fragmentation (which later became known as PYTHIA) became available and much of the data on forward produced hadrons were used to tune this model.
The NA9/NA28 phases of the experiment commenced taking data in 1981. The main results of these experiments were the confirmation of our understanding of the quark fragmentation process. Again the results were used to develop models of this process such as PYTHIA and the HERWIG model which had become available. The NA28 experiment discovered that the results of scattering in nuclei at small values of Bjorken x were much different from those at larger values. The process governing this behavior became known as shadowing in nuclei.
The final phase of the experiment with the polarized target produced the most dramatic result from the experiment with the discovery
only a small part of the proton spin is carried by quarks, and that the strange quark sea is probably polarized. This is sometimes referred to as the "proton spin crisis".


Truly neutral particle

In particle physics, a truly neutral particle is a subatomic particle that is its own antiparticle. In other words, it remains itself under the charge conjugation which replaces particles with their corresponding antiparticles. All charges of a "truly neutral particle" must be equal to zero. This requires particles to not only be electrically neutral, but also requires that all of their other charges (like the colour charge) are neutral.
Known examples of such elementary particles include photons, Z bosons, and Higgs bosons, along with the hypothetical neutralinos, sterile neutrinos, and gravitons. For a spin-½ particle such as the neutralino, being "truly neutral" implies being a Majorana fermion.
Composite particles can also be truly neutral. A system composed of a particle forming a bound state with its antiparticle, such as the neutral pion (), is "truly neutral". Such a state is called an “onium”, another example of which is positronium, the bound state of an electron and a positron ().
By way of contrast neutrinos are not "truly neutral" since they have a weak isospin of ±½, or equivalently, a non-zero weak hypercharge, both of which are charge-like quantum numbers. (The example presumes on evidence to date, which gives no indication that neutrino are Majorana particles.)


David Kelly Campbell

David Kelly Campbell is an American theoretical physicist and academic leader. His research has spanned high energy physics, condensed matter physics and nonlinear dynamics. He also served as Physics Department Head at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Dean of the College Engineering at Boston University, and Boston University Provost.


Friedrich Burmeister

Friedrich Burmeister (1890–1969) was a German geophysicist. He was director of the Munich University’s Geomagnetic Observatory.
Burmeister studied mathematics and physics at the University of Munich under Hugo von Seeliger and Arnold Sommerfeld, and he received his doctorate in 1919. Upon graduation, he became Director of the Munich Geomagnetic Observatory, of the Geomagnetism Branch of the Munich Earth Observatory, under the Geophysics Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, at the University of Munich. Due to the industrialization of Munich, operation of the observatory became more and more difficult, so, in 1927 the Munich Geomagnetic Observatory was closed and moved to a village 25 kilometers west of Munich, and it became the Maisach Geomagnetic Observatory. Due to the construction of a large military air base near Maisach, this facility was closed on October 31, 1937. It was moved to a small town west of Munich, and it became the Fürstenfeldbruck Geomagnetic Observatory where measurements began on 1 January 1939 under Burmeister as its inaugural director. Burmeister retired as director of the observatory in 1958, whereupon Karl Wienert was appointed to the position.


John Winston Belcher

John Winston Belcher (born 1943) is a professor of physics holding the "Class of '22" professorship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Belcher's research interests are within the areas of space plasma physics. He was the principal investigator on the Voyager Plasma Science Experiment and is now a co-investigator on the Plasma Science Experiment on board the Voyager Interstellar Mission. Professor Belcher has twice received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, and received the 2016 Oersted Medal for his exceptional work in revolutionizing the Undergraduate Physics department at MIT by introducing novel teaching formats such as TEAL. Belcher is actively involved in Mental Health initiatives at the institute and is an active MacVicar Faculty Fellow (2000-2006)
Background.
Belcher was born in Louisiana in 1943 and graduated from Odessa High School in 1961. Belcher later graduated from Rice University with a double major in Math and Physics. He later went to Caltech and received his PhD in Astrophysics. Shortly after which Belcher came to MIT and began work with the Space Plasma Group on the Voyager project.


Heliotron J

Heliotron J is a fusion research device in Japan, specifically a helical-axis heliotron designed to study plasma confinement in this type of device. It is located at the Institute of Advanced Energy of Kyoto University.


International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics

The International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics is a significant international conference series in the field of neutrino physics, during which talks detailing notable progress in theoretical and experimental work are given. In addition, the conference reviews the status of proposed research in neutrino physics and astrophysics. Held every two years, the conference programs consist of plenary sessions with invited speakers, poster sessions and short evening talks. The shorthand designator for a particular conference is "Neutrino" followed by its year, e.g. Neutrino 2011.
The first conference was held in Balatonfüred in 1972; however, three preceding conferences are often referenced with respect to the history of the Neutrino series. These meetings include the 1965 Informal Conference on Experimental Neutrino Physics at CERN; a 1968 conference in Moscow sponsored by the Academy of the USSR, which was organized just after certain cosmic ray neutrino events were seen in the gold mines of India, South Africa and Utah; and a 1970 meeting in Cortona.
Each conference is supervised by a changing International Advisory Committee as well as the permanent International Neutrino Commission. The latter is assembled from the chairs of former conferences.
The 28th meeting, Neutrino 2018, concluded June 9, 2018 in Heidelberg after featuring presentations encompassing many different branches of neutrino physics. It was recently announced that Neutrino 2024 will be held in Milano, following the 2020 conference in Chicago and the 2022 conference in Seoul.


Lee C. Teng

Lee C. Teng ( Pinyin: Dèng Chāng–lí; born 5 September 1926) is a senior physicist emeritus at the Advanced Photon Source of the Argonne National Laboratory. He has made numerous contributions to the field of accelerator physics.
Career.
Teng was born in Beijing, but his ancestral home is in Fuzhou. He graduated from The Catholic University of Peking (Fu Jen University) in Beijing in 1946. Teng left his native China in 1947 to attend graduate school in physics at the University of Chicago.
Since receiving his PhD in 1951, Lee has worked at the University of Minnesota, the Wichita State University, Argonne National Laboratory, and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). He was the Director of the Particle Accelerator Division at Argonne National Laboratory.
In 1983, Teng took a partial leave of absence from Fermilab to serve as the founding director of what is now the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center (NSRRC) in Taiwan.
Honors.
In 1956, on his first trip to Taiwan he was awarded the "Gold Medal of
Achievement" by the Chinese Ministry of Education.
He received the "Distinguished Service Award" from the American Immigrants
Service League in 1962.
In 1964 he was elected to member (Academician) of Academia Sinica, Taiwan/Republic of China.
He was conferred an "Honorary Professor" of the Beijing Normal University in 1970.
In 2007, the American Physical Society awarded Teng the Robert R. Wilson Prize for Achievement in the Physics of Particle Accelerators.
The "Lee Teng Internship in Accelerator Science and Engineering" was created jointly by Argonne, Fermilab, and the US Particle Accelerator School in 2007 in Teng's honor.


Allan Snyder

Allan Whitenack Snyder is the director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, Australia where he also holds the 150th Anniversary Chair of Science and the Mind. He is a co-founder of Emotiv Systems and winner of the International Australia Prize in 1997 and the Marconi Prize in 2001 for his contributions to optical physics.
Allan is also the Creator and Chairman of the "What Makes a Champion?" forum, an official Olympic cultural event first held at the Sydney 2000, then Beijing 2008 and forthcoming London 2012 Olympic Games. Nelson Mandela and John Howard opened the 2000 event. Tony Blair and Kevin Rudd opened the 2008 Beijing event.
Snyder's research career began in optical physics and he has published several important papers and books in this field . More recently, he has begun to work on mind sciences.
Snyder has appeared in several television programs demonstrating how transcranial magnetic stimulation to the left temporal lobe can induce savant-like skills in healthy people. For example, these studies show that after TMS, a person can draw better or count the number of dots on a screen very fast.
Savant hypothesis.
Snyder is interested in understanding savants, how the savant brain perceives and interprets the world, the neurological and subjective correlates of the savant brain, and how to activate or at least promote savant level brain functions in non-autistic, healthy individuals. Even something as simple as seeing, he explains, requires phenomenally complex information processing. When a person looks at an object, for example, the brain immediately estimates an object's distance by calculating the subtle differences between the two images on each retina (computers programmed to do this require extreme memory and speed). During the process of face recognition, the brain analyzes countless details, such as the texture of skin and the shape of the eyes, jawbone, and lips. The vast majority of people are simply unaware of these calculations due to the brains' information filtering processes. In savants, says Snyder, the top layer of mental processing —conceptual thinking, making logical deductions— is somehow deactivated. His working hypothesis is that once this layer is inactivate, one can access a startling capacity for recalling the most minute detail or for performing lightning-quick calculations. Snyder's theory has a conclusion of its own: He believes it may be possible someday to create technologies that will allow any non-autistic person to access these abilities.
Awards.
He won the Harrie Massey Medal and Prize in 1996.
In December 2001 he received the Marconi Prize in New York City.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1990 and is the recipient of their 2001 Clifford Paterson Prize.
Previously, he was a Guggenheim Fellow at Yale University’s School of Medicine and a Royal Society Research Fellow at the Physiology Laboratories of Cambridge University. He is a graduate of Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University College London.
Education.
Snyder has a DSc from the University of London, a PhD from University College (1969), London, an MS from Harvard University (1967), an SM from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1965) and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University (1963), University Park.
Centre for the Mind.
The Centre for the Mind is the brainchild of Professor Allan Snyder FRS, and was launched at the historic Museum of Sydney on 4 August 1997. Dr Oliver Sacks, renowned author and neurobiologist, delivered the Foundation Lecture on "Creativity and the Mind" at the gala public opening on 5 August 1997. This event was held at the Australian Academy of Science where Dr Sacks received the Foundation Medal from the President of the Academy, Sir Gustav Nossal.
The Inaugural Centre for the Mind board members were:
Distinguished Medal recipients:
What they do.
"We explore what it is to be uniquely human. We do this by investing in challenging research, by orchestrating spectacular intellectual events, and by acting as a global nexus for great minds. Our mind laboratories focus on scientific ways to enhance creativity and to instill the champion mindset."


Ignazio Ciufolini

Ignazio Ciufolini (born 1951) is an Italian physicist active in the field of gravitational physics and general relativity.
Biography.
Ignazio Ciufolini graduated magna cum laude in 1980 at Sapienza University of Rome, and received a PhD in Physics in 1984 at the University of Texas at Austin.
From 1982 to 1988 he worked at University of Texas at Austin as a teaching assistant, lecturer and research associate. He is now an Associate Professor of General Physics at University of Salento (Italy), tenured since 1999, and a member of Centro Fermi, Rome. He collaborated with John Archibald Wheeler in 1995 to write "Gravitation and Inertia", for which they won the PROSE Award for the best professional and scholar book in physics and astronomy. He works mainly in the field of General Relativity and Gravitational Physics, proposing a method to measure the effects of gravitomagnetism using the data from the laser ranged satellites LAGEOS and LAGEOS-2. He was featured on the cover of the September 6, 2007 issue of Nature, dedicated to his review paper on Dragging of Inertial Frames and General Relativity. He is the Principal Investigator for the Italian Space Agency (ASI) of the Laser Relativity Satellite (LARES) mission, a space mission aimed to improve the accuracy of the measurement of frame-dragging.
In 2010 he won the Giuseppe Occhialini Medal and Prize, jointly awarded by the Italian Physical Society and the Institute of Physics.
He has been accused of publishing papers on the scientific pre-print archive arXiv.org under pseudonyms, such as G. Felici, and G. Forst which is a violation of the arXiv terms. He sued the Italian physicist Lorenzo Iorio twice for defamation, but Iorio was acquitted of these charges in both trials.


Katharine Way

Katharine "Kay" Way (February 20, 1902 – December 9, 1995) was an American physicist best known for her work on the Nuclear Data Project. During World War II, she worked for the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. She became an adjunct professor at Duke University in 1968.
Education and early life.
Katharine Way was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, the second child of William Addisson Way, a lawyer, and his wife Louise Jones. She had an older brother and a younger sister. Originally named Catherine, she later changed the spelling to Katharine. Friends and colleagues generally knew her as Kay. Her mother died when she was twelve years old, and her father married an ear and throat specialist, who provided Kay with a role model of a career woman.
Way was educated at Miss Hartridge's boarding school in Plainfield, New Jersey, and Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 1920 she entered Vassar College, but was forced to drop out after two years after becoming ill with suspected tuberculosis. After convalescing in Saranac Lake, New York, she attended Barnard College for two semesters in 1924 and 1925.
From 1929 to 1934 she studied at Columbia University, where Edward Kasner stoked an interest in mathematics, and co-authored Way's first published academic paper. She graduated with her BS in 1932. She next went to the University of North Carolina, where John Wheeler stimulated an interest in nuclear physics, and she became his first PhD student. Because jobs were hard to come by during the Great Depression, she stayed on as a graduate student after completing the requirements of her PhD.
In 1938, she became a Huff Research Fellow at Bryn Mawr College, which allowed her to receive her PhD for her thesis on nuclear physics, "Photoelectric Cross Section of the Deuteron". She subsequently took up a teaching position at the University of Tennessee in 1939, becoming an assistant professor in 1941.
At a conference in New York in 1938, Way presented a paper, "Nuclear Quadrupole and Magnetic Moments", in which she examined deformation of a spinning atomic nucleus under three models, including Niels Bohr's liquid drop model. She followed this up with a closer examination of the liquid drop model in a paper entitled "The Liquid-Drop Model and Nuclear Moments", in which she showed that the resulting cigar-shaped nucleus could be unstable. Wheeler later recalled that:
Manhattan Project.
In 1942, Wheeler recruited Way to work on the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. Working with physicist Alvin Weinberg, Way analyzed neutron flux data from Enrico Fermi's early nuclear reactor designs to see whether it would be possible to create a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. These calculations were put to use in the construction of Chicago Pile-1. Afterwards, she examined the problem of nuclear poisoning of reactors by certain fission products. With physicist Eugene Wigner she developed the Way-Wigner approximation for fission product decay.
Way also visited the Hanford Site and the Los Alamos Laboratory. In mid-1945 she moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where she continued her research into nuclear decay. While there, she began to specialize in the collection and organization of nuclear data.
With Dexter Masters, she co-edited the 1946 "New York Times" bestseller "One World or None: a Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb". The book included essays by Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, and sold over 100,000 copies.
Later life.
Way moved to Washington, D.C., in 1949, where she went to work for the National Bureau of Standards. Four years later, she persuaded the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council to establish the Nuclear Data Project (NDP), an organization with special responsibility for gathering and disseminating nuclear data, under her leadership. The NDP moved to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1964, but Way remained its head until 1968. Beginning in 1964, the NDP published a journal, "Nuclear Data Sheets", to disseminate the information that the NDP had gathered. This was joined the following year by a second journal, "Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables". She also persuaded the editors of "Nuclear Physics" to add keywords to the subject headings of articles to facilitate cross-referencing.
Way left the NDP in 1968 and became an adjunct professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, although she continued as editor of "Nuclear Data Sheets" until 1973, and "Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables" until 1982. In later life she became interested in the health problems of seniors, and lobbied for improved health care for them.
Way, who never married, died at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on December 9, 1995.


Rob Blokzijl

Robert "Rob" Blokzijl (21 October 1943 – 1 December 2015) was a Dutch physicist and computer scientist at the National Institute for Subatomic Physics (NIKHEF), and an early internet pioneer. He was founding member and chairman of RIPE, the Reseaux IP Europeenne, the European Internet Registrar organisation.
Life and work.
Born in Amsterdam, Blokzijl graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 1970, and received a doctorate in experimental physics from the same university in 1977.
Blokzijl had been active in building networks for the particle physics community in Europe. He was founding member and chairman of NIKHEF, the National Institute for Nuclear and High energy physics in the Netherlands. At the Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE), the European open forum for IP networking, he was spokesperson at its foundation in 1989 and later chaired this forum. He was also instrumental in the creation of the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) in 1992 as the first regional Internet registry (RIR) in the world. In 1999 he also was selected for the ICANN Board by the Address Supporting Organization, where he served until December 2002. In 2013 Blokzijl announced his resignation as chairman of RIPE, as per RIPE 68, after being in this position for 25 years. He appointed Hans Petter Holen as his successor.
In 2010 Blokzijl was awarded Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau. He received this Royal Honour from Lodewijk Asscher, the Acting Mayor of Amsterdam. At the 93rd IETF meeting in 2015, Blokzijl was awarded the ISOC Jonathan B. Postel Service Award.
He died on 1 December 2015, aged 72.
On 1 December 2016, the RIPE NCC established the Rob Blokzijl Foundation to honour Rob's legacy by recognising and rewarding individuals who make substantial contributions to the development of the internet in the RIPE NCC service region.


Superficial X-rays

Superficial X-rays are low-energy X-rays that do not penetrate very far before they are absorbed. They are produced by X-ray tubes operating at voltages in the 10–100 kV range, and therefore have peak energies in the 10–100 keV range. Precise naming and definitions of energy ranges may vary, and X-rays at the lower end of this range may also be known as Grenz rays. They are useful in radiation therapy for the treatment of various benign or malignant skin problems, including skin cancer and severe eczema. They have a useful depth of up to 5 mm. In some locations, orthovoltage treatment is being replaced by electron therapy or brachytherapy.
As well as teletherapy, X-rays in this energy range (and the low orthovoltage range) are used for imaging patients, to analyse materials and objects in industrial radiography and for crystallography.


Albert Messiah

Albert Messiah (23 September 1921, Nice – 17 April 2013, Paris) was a French physicist.
He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique.
He spent the Second World War in the French Resistance: he embarked June 22, 1940, in Saint-Jean-de-Luz to England and participated in the Battle of Dakar with Charles de Gaulle in September 1940. He joined the Free French Forces in Chad, and the 2nd Armored Division in September 1944, and participated in the assault of Hitler's Eagle's nest at Berchtesgaden in 1945.
After the war, he went to Princeton to attend the seminar of Niels Bohr on quantum mechanics. He returned to France and introduced the first general courses of quantum mechanics in France, at the University of Orsay and joined the newly created atomic energy agency, the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA) where he stayed until the end of his career.
His classic textbook on quantum mechanics (Dunod 1959) has trained generations of French and world physicists.
He was the director of the Physics Division at the CEA and professor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University.
He was honored as Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur of France (2012).
External links.
Family: At the time of his death, he was married to Janine Grenier-Messiah. His children were Martine Messiah, Antoine Messiah and Pierre-Henri Messiah.


The Racah Institute of Physics

The Racah Institute of Physics () is an institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, part of the faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences on the Edmund J. Safra Campus in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem, Israel.
The Institute is the center for all research and teaching in the various fields of physics at the Hebrew University. These include astrophysics, high energy physics, quantum physics, nuclear physics, solid state physics, laser and plasma physics, biophysics, non-linear and statistical physics, and nanophysics. Both experimental and theoretical research is carried on in these fields.
History.
In 1913, before the opening of the Hebrew University, first steps towards physics research in Jerusalem were taken by Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann, the President of the Zionist Organisation, and the major figure in the planning and founding of the Hebrew University contacted Leonard Ornstein, the known physicist from Utrecht, the Netherlands, to prepare plans for physics research at the upcoming university. After the University was officially opened, he became the chairman of the physics group for several years, acting from his seat at Utrecht.
In the year 1923, two years before its official opening, Albert Einstein gave a talk on Mount Scopus, the first campus of the University, on his Theory of Relativity. This talk was considered by many as the opening talk of the Hebrew University.
Einstein, who supported actively the foundation and development of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem since 1919 and throughout his entire life, was particularly active in helping to establish a good physics institute.
The known mathematician, Abraham Fraenkel, who was on the governing board and served later as dean and rector of the University, invested great efforts looking for an excellent physicist to take the chair of theoretical physics in Jerusalem. He corresponded extensively with Einstein on this matter, seeking advice on the various possible candidates.
The first experimental physicist to be appointed (in 1928) was Shmuel Sambursky. He carried out his experiments in atomic spectroscopy during his visits to Ornstein's laboratory in Utrecht. His teaching duties consisted of the courses in classical experimental physics. In later years he became a well known historian of physics.
In 1933 Ernst Alexander joined the experimental physics department and a year later – Guenther Wolfson. Both had to leave their posts in Germany due to the new racial laws, in spite of being highly appraised experimental physicists there. Both of them contributed substantially to the creation of an experimental infrastructure for physics research in Jerusalem.
In 1934 the already known nuclear physicist George Placzek accepted a position in the department. After a few months in Jerusalem he left due to the lack of the experimental facilities which he considered necessary for his research.
During the years 1935–38, several great physicists were offered the chair in theoretical physics. Felix Bloch, Eugene Wigner and Fritz London considered the offer seriously, everyone in his turn, after they had to leave their positions in Europe. They all declined after lengthy negotiations for differing personal reasons.
Finally, Giulio (Yoel) Racah, a young professor in Pisa, Italy, was appointed. He was highly recommended by his teacher and mentor Enrico Fermi, as well as by Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr and others. As a Zionist he was determined to come and teach in Hebrew in Jerusalem. He turned the theoretical physics department in Jerusalem into a world center for atomic spectroscopy. He died in an accident in 1965, age 56. Five years later, in 1970, experimental and theoretical physics departments were united into one new Institute named after Racah.
Early research.
In a series of groundbreaking papers, Racah developed the mathematical methods, which are now textbook methods, for the calculation of the spectra of complex atoms. This work was carried out in Jerusalem in complete scientific isolation during the years of World War II. In this work he pioneered the use of symmetries and group theory for these calculations. Theoretical atomic spectroscopy was also the subject of most of his students and visitors. However, some of his best students started to apply his elaborate methods to the young science of nuclear spectroscopy. In Jerusalem, Nissan Zeldes, who became the world expert in the theory of nuclear masses, and Gideon Rakavy. Two of Racah's students, Amos de-Shalit and Igal Talmi, became the world leaders in theoretical nuclear spectroscopy. They founded the nuclear physics department at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth.
As mentioned, experimental physics was carried out from the late 1920s, first by Sambursky in atomic spectroscopy then by Alexander and Wolfson in X-ray spectroscopy, crystallography and optics.
In 1950 William Low (Ze'ev Lev), who was a student of Charles Townes in the United States, joined the experimental physics. He started new fields of research in Jerusalem. Starting to work on microwaves, he then set up a laboratory for magnetic resonance research. He also pioneered cryogenics and laser physics in Jerusalem. Nuclear magnetic resonance followed, including its medical application. Abraham Halperin and Abraham Many, two of Racah's early graduates, started new research directions in the physics of the solid state. They did experimental research on the optical and electrical properties of insulators and semiconductors, as well as the surface properties of solids. These fields of research were just starting to thrive along with the birth of the transistor.
An important addition to the experimental group was Solly G. Cohen from England. He joined the physics in 1949 and became its first nuclear experimentalist measuring very long lived radionuclides as well as extremely short lived nuclear states. In the early sixties his interests shifted to the newly discovered Mossbauer effect, and established a research group which turned Jerusalem into a world center in this field.
Many graduates of the Racah Institute (and the physics departments which preceded it) became leading professors and scientists (including a Nobel Laureate) in Israel and all over the world.
During its existence the Institute enjoyed visits of many important physicists from all over the world. Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Robert Oppenheimer, John Wheeler and Stephen Hawking, to mention just a few. All Wolf Prize winners and a great number of Nobel Laureates were amongst the visitors.
Current research.
Current research at the Racah Institute covers the fields of astrophysics, high energy physics, nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, statistical physics, nonlinear physics, biophysics, quantum optics, quantum information and computational neuroscience.
Condensed Matter Physics.
Condensed Matter Physics at the Racah Institute contains both a strong theoretical and an experimental effort. Most investigations are performed within the expansive field of many-body physics, with particular emphasis on nonequilibrium phenomena, the effects of decoherence and dissipation, the study of low-dimensional systems, and glassy systems, to name but a few subjects. Another direction of research includes statistical physics applied, for example, to reaction diffusion systems, especially in cases where fluctuations have an important effect.
Within the realm of theory, the methods being employed range from various field theoretic methods, both exact and perturbative, to numerical methods and exact methods based on the theory of both classical and quantum integrability. These concepts and methods are applied to a variety of physical systems, such as quantum impurity problems (realized, e.g., in quantum dots), the fractional quantum Hall effect, one-dimensional fermionic gases, Anderson transitions, and superconductivity, including special aspects related to high-Tc superconductivity.
On the experimental side, benefiting from the facilities of the Harvey M. Krueger center for nanoscience and nanotechnology, researchers apply modern measuring and fabrication techniques to study the physics of nano-structures, their application to quantum information processing, the interaction of light and matter, high-Tc superconductivity, and the physics of electron glasses. More specifically, and summarizing but a few of the research directions, researchers study excitonic fluids in semiconductor nanostructures with an eye on both a better physical understanding of their macroscopic quantum coherence properties and possible future applications in electro-optic devices. Josephson junctions are being studied in order to expose and optimize the conditions that allow for long-lived macroscopic quantum coherence, and to clarify the processes that lead to noise and decoherence. Electron glasses are being studied in order to understand the underlying mechanisms that lead to their peculiar properties, specifically the interplay of interactions, disorder and nonequilibrium, as well as how these are manifested in transport properties.
High Energy Physics.
High Energy Physics (HEP) research includes both HEP theory and particle phenomenology.
One of the current activities of the High Energy Physics group at the Racah Institute of Physics involves the fundamental laws of nature, touching upon both Quantum Field Theory and General relativity (Einstein's gravity) together with the geometry and mathematics which underlie them. Evaluation of Feynman diagrams lies at the computational core of Quantum Field Theory, yet despite considerable progress over more than 70 years a general and full theory is not available. Research in the group addresses this issue. This research line grew out of an approach to solving the two-body problem in Einstein's gravity in the post-Newtonian limit through a (classical) effective field theory, a problem which is essential for detection of interpretation of gravitational waves. In this approach Feynman diagrams are used to compute the two-body effective action.
A second research area is focused on physics beyond the Standard Model of the electro-weak and the strong interactions. Examples include models of Supersymmetry-breaking and its mediation to Supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model, with an emphasize on models whose properties may allow a relatively early discovery at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, models of extra dimensions and their potential signatures at the LHC and future colliders, as well as their embedding in string theory, the dynamics of Supersymmetric theories and Supersymmetry-breaking, the interplay between gauge theory and its embedding on brane constructions in string theory, the physics of black holes and the early universe in string theory, and its interplay with brane dynamics and gauge theory, e.g. via the Anti-de-Sitter/Conformal-Field-Theory correspondence, as well as various aspects of the underlying structure of string theory.
A third research area addresses quantum entanglement in Quantum Field Theory.
The Nonlinear and Statistical Physics.
The Nonlinear and Statistical Physics group pursues extensive theoretical and experimental studies, trying to understand the behavior of complex non-equilibrium systems.
The subjects are diverse and span from plasma, laser and atomic physics to physics of materials and biophysics. Specific research areas include the fundamental physics of fracture and frictional motion, elasticity of growing objects, theory of large fluctuations in systems far from equilibrium, theory and applications of autoresonance, nonequilibrium statistical physics of ultrashort laser pulse formation, and semiclassical wave packet theory of cavity/circuit quantum electrodynamics and cold atom physics.
Quantum Information.
Quantum Information is researched both experimentally and theoretically at the Racah institute. The experimental implementations include atomic, photonic, semiconductor and superconducting realizations. Entanglement and the production of single photons is actively pursued. On the theoretical side, fundamental questions of entanglement and its characterization are investigated. Another topic of research is the theory of dynamical control of ion traps and Nitrogen vacancies in Diamond.


Samantha Holdsworth

Samantha Jane Holdsworth is a medical physicist from New Zealand. She is a lecturer in medical imaging at the University of Auckland, and a principal investigator at the Centre for Brain Research.
Biography.
Holdsworth was born and grew up on a family farm near the small town of Te Karaka, near Gisborne, New Zealand. She initially studied engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, but changed to physics and completed an honours degree in the subject. She then moved to Australia and completed a master's degree at Queensland University of Technology, followed by a doctorate at the University of Queensland, in medical physics.
Following graduation, she moved to the United States and worked in the Radiological Sciences Laboratory at Stanford University's Lucas Centre. In 2018 she returned to New Zealand and was appointed a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland, based in the Centre for Advanced MRI (CAMRI). She also returned to her hometown of Gisborne and has established a medical imaging research and innovation centre there to use medical imagining technology and research to improve the health and wellbeing of people, particularly Māori, in the region.
Holdsworth's research has led to improvements in MRI methodologies, including improvements to the resolution, speed and motion-robustness of MRI. These methods have in turn led to better detection of brain injury, stroke and neurodegenerative disease.
Personal life.
Holdsworth is the daughter of businesswoman Bronwen Holdsworth.


Anomalon

In physics, an anomalon is a hypothetical type of nuclear matter that shows an anomalously large reactive cross section. They were first noticed in experimental runs in the early 1980s as short tracks in film emulsions or plastic leaf detectors connected to medium-energy particle accelerators. The direction of the tracks demonstrated that they were the results of reactions taking place within the accelerator targets, but they stopped so quickly in the detectors that no obvious explanation for their behavior could be offered. A flurry of theoretical explanations followed, but over time a series of follow-up experiments failed to find strong evidence for the anomalons, and active study of the topic largely ended by the late 1980s.
Description.
Early particle accelerators generally consisted of three parts, the accelerator, a metal target, and some sort of detector. Detectors differed depending on the reactions being studied, but one class of inexpensive and useful detectors consisted of a large volume of photographic emulsion, often on individual plates, that would capture the particles as they moved through the stack. As the high-energy community moved to larger accelerators and exotic particles and reactions, new detectors were introduced that worked on different principles. The film technique remains in use today in certain fields; small versions can be flown on balloons, while larger versions can be placed in mines, both in order to capture rare but extremely high-energy cosmic rays.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s a generation of accelerators had been made obsolete by newer machines in terms of being useful for leading edge research. Still useful for other tasks, these older machines were turned to a wide variety of new studies. One particularly active area of research is collisions between higher mass particles, instead of fundamental particles like electrons or protons. Although the total energy of the reaction is the same, or lower, than it would be using lighter elementary particles, using heavier elements increases the "number" of products from the reactions, revealing low-frequency reactions that might otherwise go unnoticed. Noble gasses are particularly useful for these experiments because they are easy to handle, unreactive and relatively inexpensive.
One such experiment was being carried out on the Bevalac at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory using Argon 40 accelerated to 1.8 GeV and then smashed into a copper target backed with a nuclear emulsion detector. It was here that the anomalons were first observed. While studying the results of these experiments, a number of very short tracks were discovered, penetrating only a short distance into the emulsion. The vast majority of the particles continued into the emulsion over much greater distances, in keeping with expectations and the results of all previous experiments on the machine. The tracks did not appear to be from outside sources like cosmic rays. Further studies were carried out with Oxygen 16 and Iron 56, and these experiments also showed the same short tracks.
In order for the particles to stop so quickly within the emulsion, they would either have to have low energies, and thus be moving slowly, be extremely massive, and thus have high energy but still move slowly, or they were reacting with the emulsion itself and turning into other particles. The first possibility, that they were low-energy particles, did not seem likely given the physics of the accelerator. The second, that they were high mass, was contradicted by other measurements that suggested the particles had a charge of 14, like silicon, and would thus be very likely have a low mass. This left only the third possibility, that they were reacting with the emulsion itself. This was by no means uncommon, these reactions were used as an integral part of the detection process, but it was the "speed" that these reactions would have to take place that was odd. In order to produce such short tracks, the particles would have to be reacting much more quickly than ever seen before. The particles became known as "anomalons" due to their apparently anomalous reaction rates. If they were following the same basic rules as other matter, and interacting with the emulsion due to the strong force, their component of the strong force was about ten times the strength of known reactions.
A series of experiments followed, attempting to duplicate the results. Many of these used an alternate detector system using thin sheets of plastic, and these failed to turn up any evidence of the anomalons. It was suggested that this was due to the cross section of the reaction, whatever it was, being much higher in higher-mass nuclei, which was the case for the emulsion detectors but not the plastic. Others suggested they were actually seeing quark-gluon soups for the first time. A workshop on the issue was held at LBNL in 1984.
However, as study continued the number of negative results continued to grow. By 1987 interest in the topic had waned, and most research in the field ended. However, some research continued and in 1998 Piyare Jain claimed to have finally demonstrated them conclusively, using larger accelerators at Brookhaven National Laboratory and CERN and combining that with a thin detector which he claimed was key to the problem of detecting the anomalons. More recently he has claimed that the particles in question are actually the elusive axion, long thought to be part of the standard model, but unseen in spite of decades of searching.


Bamin Khomami

Bamin Khomami, the Granger and Beaman Distinguished University Professor from the University of Tennessee and former Francis F. Ahmann Professor of Chemical Engineering at University of Illinois, was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after they were nominated by their Division of Fluid Dynamics in 2009, for "his insightful application of novel numerical methods, molecular modeling, and experiments toward the physical understanding of elastic fluid flows including discovering and explaining novel aspects of their purely elastic and thermomechanical instability."


Beth Nordholt

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.
Early life and education.
Nordholt is the daughter of John B. (Jack) Nordholt Jr., a former Marine and employee of Webster Manufacturing, and of Joanne Pedigo Nordholt. She is a 1976 graduate of Columbian High School in Tiffin, Ohio. She earned a bachelor's degree in 1980 from Rutgers University, and a master's degree in physics in 1983 from the California Institute of Technology.
Career and research.
She helped to design the ion mass spectrometer (IMS) for the spacecraft Cassini to gather information on Saturn's environment. She also contributed to instrumentation for NASA Deep Space 1 and Genesis missions.
Nordholt has many patents in the area of quantum communication including quantum key distribution, random number generation, and implementations for optical fiber or free space optical communication. She was a co-team leader for the Los Alamos National Laboratory quantum communications project.
Awards and honours.
In 2001, she received an R&D 100 Award as part of the Los Alamos National Laboratory "Free-Space Quantum Cryptography" project.
She became a laboratory fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2006.
Personal life.
As of 2013, she was married to Richard Hughes, a physicist and collaborator at Los Alamos National Laboratory.