Bjorn Wiik

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Bjørn Håvard Wiik (born February 17, 1937 in Bruvik , Norway , † February 26, 1999 in Appel ) was a Norwegian physicist and science manager.

Life

Wiik, whose father had a small furniture factory, lived in his Norwegian hometown of Bruvik until he began studying physics at the Technical University of Darmstadt in 1956 , which he completed with a doctorate under nuclear physicist Peter Brix . In 1965 he went to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park , California , where he specialized in particle physics , designed a superconducting microtron and worked on the newly opened electron-positron storage ring. In 1972 Wiik came to the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg and was appointed lead scientist four years later . Wiik was one of the leading physicists in the Tasso collaboration, who in 1979 achieved the first experimental detection of gluons via 3-jet events.

During his research stay at SLAC, Wiik developed the first ideas for a new type of particle accelerator , a super electron microscope, in which an electron beam is collided head-on with a proton beam to examine the smallest building blocks of matter. The idea of ​​building electron-proton storage rings instead of electron-positron storage rings was new at the time and was proposed in 1972 by Wiik, Günter Wolf , H. Gerke and H. Wiedemann for the DORIS storage ring, but it did not come to fruition at that time because of the research at the electron-positron collider (including the discovery of charmonium ) promised greater progress. Even at CERN, where Wiik was doing a research visit in 1976, the project did not get beyond a study group (CHEEP), where preference was given to proton-antiproton colliders. Only with the planning of the hadron-electron ring system (HERA) at DESY did this idea take concrete form in 1980. As one of the HERA project managers responsible for the proton accelerator complex, Wiik was in charge of realizing the largest research instrument in Germany, which began operations in 1992. Wiik is considered the "father" of the HERA model. The project proposal for a superconducting linear accelerator for Tera - electron volt energies as, TESLA , also goes back to Wiik.

From 1993 until his accidental death, Wiik was chairman of the DESY board of directors. In addition, from 1981 Wiik was professor at the II. Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Hamburg .

Fonts

  • Detectors for quark and gluon jets at high energies, DESY Hamburg, 1983
  • Electron-positron interactions Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 1979

Prizes and awards

Web links


Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to Erich Lohrmann, Paul Söding : About fast particles and bright light: 50 years DESY. Wiley / VCH 2009, he was born in Eidslanded , a village 100 km from Bergen on the coast
  2. ^ Hamburger Morgenpost: on Wiik's death , 1999.
  3. ↑ His Abitur grades were insufficient for studying in Norway, but he had a recommendation from the Norwegian physicist Odd Dahl
  4. ↑ CERN Courier: John Ellis on the discovery of the gluon , 2009.
  5. ↑ HERA. Particle physics experiments H1, ZEUS and HERMES. desy.de, 2017, accessed on February 12, 2018 .
  6. ↑ Ilka Flegel: The long way to HERA. January 27, 2004, accessed February 12, 2018 .
  7. ↑ APS Fellow Archive. Retrieved February 9, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Wiik, Bjørn
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wiik, Bjørn H .; Wiik, Björn Havard; Wiik, Bjorn Haavard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian physicist and science manager
DATE OF BIRTH February 17, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Bruvik , Norway
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 1999
Place of death Hamburg