William B. Atwood

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William Bradford Atwood (* around 1948 ) is an American physicist.

Life

Atwood studied at Caltech with a bachelor's degree in 1970 and at SLAC ( Stanford University ), where he received his doctorate in 1975 on deep inelastic electron scattering on nuclei with Richard E. Taylor . He then spent a year at CERN in Samuel CC Ting's group (Di-Muon experiment at ISR ) before returning to SLAC, where he became Assistant Professor in 1983. There he was again in Taylor's group from 1978 and they succeeded in demonstrating the parity violation in electron scattering on deuterium (one of the confirmations of the electroweak union in the standard model ). He also developed the Wavebar Shower Counter . From 1979 to 1984 he was involved in the DELCO experiment at the PEP storage ring of the SLAC (in 1984 he was the spokesman for the experiment). He was also involved in the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC) as a program manager in the linear accelerator group of John Seeman and in its detector SLD. He worked with Martin Breidenbach (with whom he is co-inventor of the Lasertron , a microwave source).

In 1989 he was involved in the ALEPH experiment of the LEP storage ring at CERN .

In 1992 he began working in gamma-ray astronomy . Together with Peter Michelson in Stanford, he proposed the GLAST gamma-ray space experiment, the later Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (in orbit from 2008). It was to be the successor to EGRET at the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory . He demonstrated its efficiency with the simulation software GISMO that he developed in the early 1990s.

In 2001 he became adjunct professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz Institute of Particle Physics (SCIPP). In 2000 he retired from SLAC, taking time out to make violins. However, he continued to develop hardware and software for the Fermi gamma ray telescope, among other things for re-analysis and reconstruction of the telescope's data.

In 2012 he received the Panofsky Prize for his leading role in the design, construction and use of the Large Area Telescope on the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. In 2011 he received the Bruno Rossi Prize with Peter Michelson and the Fermi Telescope team .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The experiment that was the subject of his dissertation was the last in the series of experiments for which Taylor, Friedman and Kendall received the Nobel Prize.
  2. ↑ Tim Stephens: Physicist Bill Atwood shares Rossi Prize for work on gamma-ray telescope. uscs.edu, January 21, 2011, accessed April 6, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Atwood, William B.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Atwood, William Bradwood
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH around 1948