Thomas Ypsilantis

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Thomas "Tom" John Ypsilantis (born June 24, 1928 in Salt Lake City , † August 16, 2000 in Geneva ) was an American experimental particle physicist .

life and work

Ypsilantis came from a Greek family in Salt Lake City, with roots in the Greek royal house of Ypsilantis . He studied physics at the University of Utah (Bachelor, 1949) in Salt Lake City and at the University of California, Berkeley , where he made his master's degree in 1952 and received his doctorate in 1955 under Emilio Segrè . Ypsilantis was part of the team led by Owen Chamberlain , Emilio Segrè and Clyde Wiegand , who discovered the antiproton on the Bevatron in 1955 . The discovery was also the subject of his dissertation. He was then from 1955 to 1960 Assistant Professor, 1960 to 1965 Associate Professor and 1967 to 1969 Professor of Physics at Berkeley. In 1959/60 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Marconi Institute of the University of Rome and in 1962/63 he was group leader at the Brookhaven National Laboratory . In 1965/66 he was a member of the Greek Atomic Energy Commission. From 1970 to 1975 he worked as a scientist at CERN , from 1976 to 1978 at the nuclear research center in Saclay , from 1978/79 at SLAC and from 1979 to 1980 again at CERN. From 1980 to 1985 he was research director of the CNRS at the École polytechnique and from 1985 to 1988 he was a regular visiting professor at UCLA . From 1985 to 1996 he was Research Director of the CNRS at the Collège de France and then Research Director at the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) at the University of Bologna . During the whole time, however, he was always staying at CERN.

At CERN he and Jacques Séguinot developed the RICH detectors ( Ring Imaging Cherenkov Counter ) from 1977 , which focused the Cherenkov light and which was first used on a larger scale at the Delphi experiment of the LEP ring at CERN in high energy physics (approved 1983) . They worked together with Tord Ekelöf. Later he also designed a neutrino detector ( AquaRICH ), which he called Superkamiokande with glasses ( superkamiokande with spectacles ) (CERN Report 1998). It was equipped with faster RICH technology with a concave spherical mirror, hybrid photodetectors on the mirror and in the focal plane and a large water tank (50 t in the proposal for the Gran Sasso Observatory ). He also worked on various other detector projects in high energy physics and astroparticle physics, for example calorimetry with liquid noble gases ( xenon ) in the LAA project ( Lepton Asymmetry Analyzer , from 1989), the HELLAZ detector for solar neutrinos (from 1990) and he made important contributions to the LHCb .

In 1963 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1986 he received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University .

In 1995 he became editor of the journal Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research .

literature

  • Tord Ekelöf: The challenges of Tom Ypsilantis . In: Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment . tape 502 , no. 1 , April 11, 2003, p. 16–22 , doi : 10.1016 / S0168-9002 (02) 02150-2 (obituary).
  • Herbert Steiner: Thomas Ypsilantis — The early years . In: Nuc. Instr. Meth. Phys. Res. Sec. A . tape 502 , no. 1 , 2003, p. 1-8 , doi : 10.1016 / S0168-9002 (02) 02148-4 .
  • Jacques Seguinot, Herbert Steiner, Antonino Zichichi: Thomas John Ypsilantis . In: Physics Today . tape 54 , no. 5 , 2001, p. 80 , doi : 10.1063 / 1.1381114 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ O. Chamberlain, E. Segrè, C. Wiegand, T. Ypsilantis: Antiprotons . In: Nature . tape 177 , no. 4497 , January 7, 1956, p. 11-12 , doi : 10.1038 / 177011a0 .
  2. ↑ J. Seguinot, T. Ypsilantis: Photo-ionization and Cherenkov ring imaging . In: Nuclear Instruments and Methods . tape 142 , no. 3 , May 1977, pp. 377-391 , doi : 10.1016 / 0029-554X (77) 90671-1 .
personal data
SURNAME Ypsilantis, Thomas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ypsilantis, Thomas John; Ypsilantis, Tom
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Salt Lake City
DATE OF DEATH August 16, 2000
Place of death Geneva