RG Hamish Robertson

Robert Graham Hamish Robertson (born October 3, 1943 in Ottawa ) is a Canadian experimental nuclear physicist. He is Boeing Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Washington and Director of the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics there.

Robertson went to school in Canada and England and studied at Oxford University with a bachelor's degree in 1965 and a master's degree in 1969. He received his doctorate in nuclear physics from McMaster University in 1971 (physics of atomic beams, nuclear structure determination). As a post-graduate student , he was at Michigan State University , where he stayed and became a professor in 1981. From 1981 he was at Los Alamos National Laboratory , where he dealt with neutrino mass determination from tritium beta decay. The upper limits for the neutrino mass determined from this showed even then that the mass contribution of the neutrinos is not sufficient for a closed universe. Since 1994 he has been a professor at the University of Washington.

He was a visiting scientist at Princeton University , the Argonne National Laboratory and the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Ontario , among others .

In nuclear physics, he was the first to observe a quintet of isobaric states in atomic nuclei and experimented with parity violation and nuclear reactions with applications to nuclear astrophysics . By precisely measuring the capture of deuterium by helium 4, he was able to prove that the lithium 6 occurrence in the universe is largely not primordial , but a more recent result of nuclear processes in stars.

Since around 1980 he has been primarily concerned with neutrino physics . He studied neutrino oscillations and solar neutrinos at the Canadian Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), of which he was scientific director from 2003 to 2004 and of which he is the US co-speaker. The data collection by SNO ended in 2006, but data is still being evaluated. After performing experiments in Los Alamos in the early 1980s to determine the neutrino mass from the spectrum of the beta decay of tritium , he continued this in the 2000s as the US spokesman for the KATRIN experiment in Karlsruhe.

He is also involved in the Majorana experiment on neutrino-free double beta decay.

In 1997 he received the Tom W. Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics . He is a member of the Canadian Association of Physicists and a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1982) (whose nuclear physics department he chaired) and the Institute of Physics (1998). He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003) and the National Academy of Sciences (2004). In 1976 he was a Sloan Fellow .

He served on the editorial boards of Physical Review D and Annual Reviews of Nuclear and Particle Science.

Fonts

• with Wick Haxton , Aldo Serenelli: Solar neutrinos. Status and perspective. 2012 ( arxiv.org ).

Web links

• RG Hamish Robertson's website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Robertson et al. a. Observation of the Capture Reaction H 2 (alpha, gamma) Li 6 and Its Role in Production of Li 6 in the Big Bang , Phys. Rev. Lett., Volume 47, 1981, pp. 1867-1870, Abstract , Erratum Volume 75, 1995, 4334
2. ↑ Majorana ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.