Alexander Chao

Alexander Wu Chao (born July 2, 1949 in Taiwan ) is a Taiwanese-American particle accelerator physicist.

Chao graduated from Tsin-Hua University in Taiwan with a bachelor's degree in 1970 and received a PhD in physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1974 . He then worked as a post-doctoral student at SLAC , where he was permanently employed from 1975 and headed the group for beam dynamics from 1981. From 1984 he was part of the design group of the Superconducting Super Collider in Berkeley, where he headed the accelerator physics department. When construction began, he moved to Texas and headed the SSC Parameter Committee. When the SSC was abandoned in 1993 he went back to the SLAC and became a professor at Stanford University .

Among other things, he dealt with the theory of collective beam instabilities in accelerators, nonlinear dynamics of particle movement in accelerators, laser-particle interaction, spin dynamics and the physics of coherent radiation sources. He was involved in the development of important accelerator projects at SLAC (Pep, Spear, Linear Accelerator SLC).

He founded a particle accelerator school in China, Taiwan and Singapore, which first took place in 1998.

Chao is a member of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

In 2018 he received the Robert R. Wilson Prize . He is a fellow of the American Physical Society . In 2008 he received the Wideröe Prize of the European Physical Society and in 2016 the US Particle Accelerator School Achievement Prize.

Fonts

• The Physics of Collective Beam Instabilities in High Energy Accelerators, Wiley, 1993
• Editor with others: The Handbook of Accelerator Physics and Engineering, World Scientific, 1999

Web links

• Homepage, SLAC
• Wilson Prize for Chao

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dates of birth according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004