Gunter Wolf awarded 2011 Stern-Gerlach Medal

The German Physical Society (DPG) awarded the 2011 Stern-Gerlach medal to Professor Gunter Wolf of the DESY research center. The medal is the highest award presented by the DPG for achievements in experimental physics. It will be presented at the 2011 annual conference of the DPG.

Professor Wolf has been a scientist at DESY since its inception and had great influence on its scientific program. His greatest research is thus closely connected with the accelerator center: in 1979 the TASSO collaboration was able to announce the discovery of the gluon. TASSO was one of the four experiments at the PETRA storage ring that for the first time experimentally observed the force carrier particle of one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Wolf was temporarily spokesman of the TASSO collaboration.

Prior to this discovery, Professor Wolf worked at the synchrotron DESY, which was the first accelerator at DESY. After an intermediate stay at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center SLAC in California (USA), he became senior scientist at DESY in 1971 and participated in the construction and the experimental program of large particle detectors at the storage rings DORIS, PETRA and HERA. In 1985, he was elected spokesman of the ZEUS Collaboration. ZEUS was one of two sophisticated particle detectors in which the electrons and protons of the HERA storage ring were brought to collision, and Professor Wolf made major contributions to the successful design and construction of the 3600 ton detector.