William J. Willis
William J. Willis (born September 15, 1932 in Fort Smith , Arkansas , † November 1, 2012 in Dobbs Ferry , New York ) was an American experimental particle physicist .
Life
William Willis studied physics at Yale University , where he received his PhD in 1958 under Earle Fowler . The subject of the dissertation was the development of bubble chambers in the group of Ralph P. Shutt . He then went to Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), where he used bubble chambers to observe weak decays of kaons and hyperons. In 1961/62 he was at CERN , where he was involved in experiments on weak decays of hyperons, which confirmed the Cabibbo theory of the weak interaction. In 1965 he became a professor at Yale University. From 1973 to 1991 he was at CERN, where he carried out experiments at the ISR , at the time propagating novel detector concepts (from which at the ISR the Axial Field Spectrometer was developed, with which the first jet events were observed), which later became the standard on Hadron colliders , and later turned to heavy ion collisions (with the aim of observing quark-gluon plasmas), and since 1991 he has been Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Columbia University . After the failure of the Superconducting Super Collider , he looked for ways to involve the US physicists in the LHC plans at CERN and was a member of the first US delegation at CERN in 1993. In the 2000s he was (until 2005) project manager in the US department of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider .
From 1994 to 2010 he was Assistant Director of the BNL. Among other things, he supported the construction of the heavy ion accelerator RHIC , which went into operation in 2000, and headed the technical committee for RHIC in the 1980s. Recently he brought his expertise in detectors with liquid argon to the planning of the neutrino experiments at Fermilab (micro-BooNE experiment).
He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and received the Panofsky Prize in 2003 for the development and application of a number of innovative techniques that were later widely used in particle physics, in particular calorimetry with liquid argon, electron detection through observation of transition radiation (Transition Radiation Detectors ) and Hyperon rays . He had been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1993 .
Willis was married with a daughter and four sons.
Web links
- Obituary at Columbia University
- Laudation for the Panofsy Prize
- Page at Columbia University
- Obituary at CERN
Individual evidence
- ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
- ↑ micro BooNE
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Willis, William J. |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American experimental particle physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 15, 1932 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Fort Smith , Arkansas |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 1, 2012 |
| Place of death | Dobbs Ferry , New York |