Barry Barish

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Barry Barish

Barry Clark Barish (born January 27, 1936 in Omaha , Nebraska ) is an American physicist. In 2017, together with Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves .

Live and act

Barish attended school in Los Angeles and studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley , with a bachelor's degree in 1957 and a doctorate in experimental high-energy physics in 1962. From 1962 he was at Caltech , where he was assistant professor in 1966, associate professor in 1969 and in 1972 Became a professor. In 1991 he became Maxine and Ronald Linde Professor . In 2005 he became Professor Emeritus.

From 1963 and into the 1970s, he was involved in high-energy neutrino experiments at the Fermilab , which were among the first experiments in which neutral weak currents of the electroweak interaction were detected. Early evidence of the quark structure of the nucleons was also found in these experiments. In the 1980s he initiated underground experiments to search for magnetic monopoles and other hypothetical particles (implemented at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy, MACRO for monopoles, Astrophysics and Cosmic Ray Observatory ) and was thus at the forefront of astroparticle physics . MACRO did not find any magnetic monopoles, but provided indications of neutrino masses.

At the beginning of the 1990s he was one of the directors of the construction of both GEM (Gammas, Electrons, Muons) detectors for the planned, but ultimately not realized Superconducting Super Collider project. Essential parts of the project and many of the employees found their way into the later LHC detector.

In 1994 he became a Principal Investigator at LIGO and from 1997 to 2005 he was its Director. He set up the experiment from financing and designing the laser interferometer to organizing the international collaboration of over 1000 employees. LIGO's Advanced Proposal was drawn up in his time as director. In 2015, LIGO provided the first direct evidence of gravitational waves and the merging of two black holes. The discovery was announced to the public in February 2016 (and presented by Barish at CERN).

From 2006 to 2013 he was director of the Global Design Effort for the International Linear Collider , which is supposed to explore the same energy range as the LHC, only with greater precision. From 2001 to 2002 he was co-director of the committee of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP), which plans the long-term strategy of high energy physics in the USA.

Awards and memberships

In 2016 he and Adalberto Giazotto received the Premio Enrico Fermi for their share in the discovery of gravitational waves and the discovery of merging black holes (binary black hole mergers) (laudation).

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the American Association for the Advancement of Science , an external member of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the American Physical Society , of which he was President in 2011. He has honorary doctorates from Glasgow, Bologna, the University of Florida, Southern Methodist University and the University of Sofia and has held the Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers . Van Vleck Lectures . In 2017 he received the Henry Draper Medal . Also in 2017 he was awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize . In 2002 he held the From 2003 to 2009 he was on the National Science Board. In 2017 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Kip S. Thorne and Rainer Weiss . Also in 2017 he received the Cocconi Prize of the European Physical Society and the Fudan-Zhonghi Science Award of the University of Fudan.

Web links

Commons : Barry Barish  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Nobel Prize in Physics 2017
  2. Honorary Doctor Barish 2018, SMU