APS Acknowledges Achievements

The American Physical Society has named several recipients of its awards for 2003.

The Fluid Dynamics Prize went to Jerry Gollub for his “elucidation of chaos, instabilities, mixing and pattern formation in various contexts including fluid convection,” and for his contributions to our understanding of surface waves, film, and granular flows “through his clever experiments, lucid papers, and lively lectures.” Gollub is a professor in the natural sciences and a professor of physics at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and also an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Eugene Parker won the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for his “seminal contributions in plasma astrophysics, including predicting the solar wind, explaining the solar dynamo, and formulating the theory of magnetic re-connection, and the instability which predicts the escape of the magnetic fields from the galaxy.” Parker is the S. Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the department of physics, the department of astronomy and astrophysics, and the Enrico Fermi Institute, all at the University of Chicago.

Mark Kasevich, professor of physics and applied physics at Stanford University, received the I. I. Rabi Prize for “developing atom interferometer inertial sensors with unprecedented precision” and “pioneering studies of Bose–Einstein condensates, especially the achievement of non-classical spin states and the demonstration of a mode-locked atom laser.”

David Pritchard, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and associate director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, was honored with the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for his “groundbreaking studies of coherent atom optics and pioneering work on laser cooling and trapping of atomic gases.”

The Otto LaPorte Award recipient was Norman J. Zabusky, State of New Jersey Professor of Computational Fluid Dynamics at Rutgers University. He was recognized for his “enduring contributions in nonlinear and vortex physics and computational fluid dynamics including the soliton; contour dynamics and V-states for [two-dimensional] flows; vortex projectiles for accelerated inhomogeneous flows; and visiometrics for reduced modeling.”

Siegfried Glenzer received the Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research for “elegant diagnostics using collective Thomson scattering together with x-ray spectroscopy which greatly advanced the understanding of the complex plasma environment in laser-driven hohlraums used in inertial confinement fusion.” Glenzer is the plasma physics group leader in the National Ignition Facility program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The Shock Compression Science Award went to James Asay for his “personal research in shock compression science, for leadership in developing programs and tools that have strongly impacted the field, and for leadership in the technical community.” Asay is associate director of the Institute for Shock Physics at Washington State University in Pullman.

The Mitsuyoshi Tanaka Dissertation Award went to Geralyn Zeller, postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University, for her dissertation entitled “A Precise Measurement of the Weak Mixing Angle in Neutrino–Nucleon Scattering,” which was completed under the supervision of Heidi Schellman at Northwestern University. According to the citation, Zeller’s work “provides the most accurate measurement to date of the weak mixing angle using this technique. The value lies three standard deviations away from global electroweak fits, suggesting the existence of physics contributions from beyond the standard model.”

Daniel Steck, postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, garnered the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics for his dissertation “Quantum Chaos, Transport, and Decoherence in Atom Optics” completed under the guidance of Mark Raizen at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in Plasma Physics Award went to Alex Arefiev for his dissertation, which discusses “first-principles theoretical analysis of a plasma thruster that models the helicon plasma source, single-pass radio frequency heating, and particle and momentum balance.” Arefiev, whose thesis advisers were Boris Breizman and Roger Bengtson at the University of Texas at Austin, is now a postdoctoral fellow in the university’s Institute for Fusion Studies.

The Nicholson Medal for Humanitarian Service was presented to H. Eugene Stanley, University Professor and director of the Center for Polymer Studies at Boston University, for his “extraordinary contributions to human rights, for his initiatives on behalf of female physicists, and for his caring and supportive relationship with those who have worked in his laboratory.”