Obituary of Benjamin Ching-Chun Shen

Updated by Bill Gary 22 January 2008

Distinguished Professor of Physics Benjamin C. Shen died from cancer on July 12, 2007 after 38 years of service at the University of California, Riverside. He was instrumental in the founding of the experimental high energy physics group at UCR and to the building of the UCR Department of Physics (now Physics and Astronomy) in general. He served as Chair of the Department three times: from 1988-1990, 1991-1993, and 2003-2005. Within the high energy physics community, he was well known as an effective and affable group leader with a focus on experimentation at SLAC and CERN. His sense of humor, integrity, good nature and taste for life were contagious. He will be missed by his many friends and colleagues.

Born in 1938 in Shanghai China, Ben’s early life was marked by the tumultuous events of that era. With his parents and three siblings, he moved repeatedly throughout southern and western China to avoid the conflicts then ravaging the country. The family eventually settled in Taiwan in 1949. After graduating from Chien-Kuo High School in Taipei in 1954, Ben came to the US in 1956 with a scholarship to study at Providence College in Rhode Island. The next year, he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley where he earned his bachelors degree in 1959 and Ph.D. in 1965, both in physics. His graduate research was directed by Gerson Goldhaber. His thesis dissertation was on resonance production in pion-proton interactions at the 20 inch bubble chamber at BNL and the 72 inch bubble chamber at LBL. In particular, he participated in the discovery of the A_2 [now called a_2(1320)] meson. While at Berkeley, he met his future wife Mayling Cheng. They were married in 1963.

After earning his Ph.D., Ben worked two years as a research associate at LBL, then for two additional years as a research associate at SLAC. During this latter period, he studied K0L-proton and electron-beryllium interactions at the SLAC hydrogen bubble chamber. In 1969 he joined the young Department of Physics at UC Riverside. The focus of his work then shifted to CERN and to proton-proton diffractive physics at the Intersecting Storage Rings. In the early 1980’s he moved his group back to SLAC, becoming deputy spokesperson and then spokesperson of the TPC-PEP4 experiment where his physics interests centered on two-photon interactions. As spokesperson of TPC-PEP4, he oversaw the crucial transition period between the detector-building and data-analysis phases.

Foreseeing future developments, Ben joined the OPAL Collaboration at CERN in 1986. His group’s interests ranged from studies of the Z boson lineshape, to tau physics, to searches for New Particles. In the early 1990’s, when many US high energy physics groups planned efforts at the Superconducting Super Collider, Ben was convinced that the physics could be done more effectively at the Large Hadron Collider being proposed for CERN. He led the UCR group in a research and development project at CERN to explore technologies for muon detection at the LHC. He played a leading role in early American participation at the LHC: UCR was one of only four US institutions to be a founding member of the CMS experiment. Reflecting his longtime interest in electron-positron annihilation physics, Ben joined the BABAR Collaboration at SLAC in 2002, then splitting his activities between BABAR and CMS.

Ben’s honors included election as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and as a foreign member of the Academy of Science of the University of Bologna. He held appointments as a visiting scientist or visiting professor at many institutions, including CERN, JPL, and the National Central University of Taiwan. He was a member of the URA Board of Overseers for Fermilab from 1997 to 2002 and served on many UCR campus and University of California system-wide committees. For many years, he acted as an informal science advisor to the late Congressman George Brown.

Ben will be remembered as a versatile and effective physicist with exceptional vision and personal skills. He was a highly valued mentor for many generations of students, postdocs, and junior faculty. He is survived by his wife Mayling, his two daughters Kathy and Christine, and five grandchildren.