Charles Y. Prescott

Charles Young Prescott (* 1938 in Ponca City , Oklahoma ) is an American experimental particle physicist.

Prescott studied at Rice University ( bachelor's degree in 1961) and at Caltech , where he received his PhD in 1966 . He then worked as a researcher at the Caltech Synchrotron Laboratory until 1970. In 1970/71 he was an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz . From 1971 he was at SLAC , where he has been a permanent member since 1974, becoming an associate professor in 1980 and a professor in 1986. At the same time, he was Associate Director of the Research Department from 1986. From 2006 he has been Professor Emeritus at SLAC.

In the 1970s he investigated deep inelastic scattering of polarized electrons on nucleons at the SLAC and the parity violation observed in the process . These experiments confirmed the electroweak theory of the Standard Model at a time when some other parity violation experiments in atomic physics seemed to contradict it ( Patrick Sandars et al.). He also studied the spin structure of nucleons with polarized electron beams.

In the 2000s he was involved in the EXO (Enriched Xenon Observatory) experiment to investigate neutrino-free double beta decay at SLAC ( Martin Breidenbach and others) and in studies for future linear accelerators .

In 1988 he received the first Panofsky Prize . He has been an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1995 . In 1997 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 2001 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences .

literature

• Prescott: Weak electromagnetic interference in electron deuteron scattering. In: Lillian Hoddeson, Laurie Brown, Riordan, Max Dresden (editor): The rise of the standard model. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Web links

• Particle Physics & Astronomy. Faculty Emeriti at SLAC
• Prescott An Overview over Spin Physics, 1991, PDF file
• To the EXO experiment, 2005