APS Names Prizewinners

Each year, the American Physical Society presents several awards to individuals to honor their contributions to the field. The recipients for 2004 are as follows.

The Will Allis Prize was awarded to J. William McConkey, professor emeritus and university professor of physics at the University of Windsor in Ontario. He was honored by the society for his “innovative experimental studies of electron collisions with atoms and molecules, which have significantly advanced our understanding of collisional and radiative processes in ionized gases at the microscopic level.”

Federico Capasso was the recipient of this year’s Arthur L. Schawlow Prize. He was selected for his “seminal contributions to the invention and demonstration of the quantum cascade laser and the elucidation of its physics, which bridges quantum electronics, solid-state physics, and materials science.” Capasso is the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at Harvard University.

The Fluid Dynamics Prize went to George M. Homsy, professor of mechanical and environmental engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is being recognized for his “many important contributions in multiphase flows, interfacial phenomena, polymeric flows, and convection including the stability of fluidized beds, viscous fingering in porous media, and thin film behavior.”

Joel Lebowitz garnered the Nicholson Medal for Humanitarian Service for his “tireless personal activism, throughout his superb career as a theoretical physicist, to help scientists and defend their human rights in countries around the globe.” Lebowitz is the G. W. Hill Professor of Mathematics and Physics and directs the Center for Mathematical Sciences Research at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey.

The two winners of the James Clerk Maxwell Prize were Noah Hershkowitz, Irving Langmuir Professor of Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Valery Godyak, corporate scientist at OSRAM SYLVANIA in Beverly, Massachusetts. They were honored for “fundamental contributions to the physics of low-temperature plasmas, including radio frequency wave heating, sheath physics, potential profiles, diagnostic probes, and the industrial applications of plasmas.”

Also honored were the five winners of the Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research. William Heidbrink, Chio Z. Cheng, Liu Chen, Edward Strait, and King-Lap Wong were cited for the “theoretical discovery and experimental identification of toroidicity induced Alfvén eigenmodes.” Heidbrink and Chen are professors in the physics and astronomy department at the University of California, Irvine. Cheng is a distinguished research fellow and heads the energetic particle physics and space plasma physics groups in the theory department at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Wong is a principal research physicist with PPPL. Strait manages the stability and physics operation group for the DIII-D tokamak experiment at General Atomics in San Diego, California.

Ki-Yong Kim received the Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award for his “development and application of ultrafast optical diagnostics to understanding the interaction dynamics of intense laser pulses with novel plasmas, including those produced in nanoscale clusters.” His thesis work was performed at the University of Maryland, College Park, under the guidance of Howard Milchberg.