Quarks

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Arthur Poskanzer, distinguished senior scientist emeritus at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Poskanzer recounts his childhood in Manhattan and his experience at Stuyvesant High School where he focused on chemistry. He discusses his undergraduate studies at Harvard and his decision to study at MIT under Charles Coryell in radio chemistry. Poskanzer describes his postgraduate research at Brookhaven where he studied high-energy protons on uranium, and he explains his decision to transfer to Berkeley Lab to work with Earl Hyde on the Bevatron. He explains how he discovered the collective flow of nuclear matter and he describes the origins of the Plastic Ball experimental group. Poskanzer discusses the contributions of the STAR collaboration and the discovery of elliptic flow and the existence of quark gluon plasma. He compares the experiences that led to his discovery of 28 isotopes and why he enjoyed discovering Helium-8 the most. Poskanzer explains the connection between his study of isotope decay and the value this had for solar neutrino experiments, and he explains why 28 was the “magic number” for neutron excess sodium isotopes. At the end of the interview, he describes how Berkeley Lab has changed over the years, and in reflecting on all the discovery he was a part of, Poskanzer emphasizes that successful scientists have an intuition that allows them to pick projects primed for success.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Francis Halzen, professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin and principal investigator for the IceCube Project. Halzen describes his involvement in the origins of the project in 1990, and he recounts his childhood in Belgium and the ordeals his family experienced during World War II. He discusses his undergraduate and graduate education at Louvain University, and he describes his developing interests in group theory and quark theory. Halzen discusses his research on non-relativistic quarks bound in mesons under the direction of Frans Cerulus, and he describes his postdoctoral research at CERN on duality between resonances and particle exchanges. He discusses his subsequent work at Brookhaven and the initial goal of finding the W boson with the ISABELLE program, and he describes the events leading to his joining the faculty in Madison. Halzen describes the leading position Wisconsin enjoyed in high-energy physics, the transitional period he found himself in with the advent of QCD, and the importance of the research being conducted at Argonne, SLAC and Fermilab over the years. He describes the origins of the AMANDA project and he explains the relevance of building a kilometer cube detector for neutrino astronomy. Halzen discusses the complementary relationship between cosmic ray and particle physics, and he explains why the IceCube project needed to be as large as it is to detect the sources of cosmic rays. He explains why Antarctica is an ideal site to detect neutrinos and what it would take to create a standard neutrino model. Halzen describes the magnitude of the event if IceCube was able to detect a neutron start merger in neutrinos, gamma rays and gravitational waves, and at the end of the interview, he describes the future goals of IceCube and how it will continue to expand our understanding of the universe. 

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Boleslaw (Bolek) Wyslouch, professor of physics at MIT and Director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, and Director of the Bates Laboratory at MIT. Wyslouch explains how the laboratories have been coping during the coronavirus pandemic and he discusses the educational opportunities available for MIT students at the labs. Wyslouch recounts his childhood in postwar Poland, and he explains how his apolitical instincts worked well with his interests in science as a student. He describes his work at CERN, Saclay, and at DESY as an undergraduate, and he conveys his good fortune to be studying physics outside of Poland during the upheavals of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Wyslouch describes meeting Samuel Ting and the subsequent opportunity he made for Wyslouch to continue his research at CERN with Ulrich Becker, and the circumstances leading to his faculty position at MIT. He describes his work on the RHIC accelerator and the impact of Frank Wilczek’s work on QCD, and he explains his ongoing collaborations at CERN. Bolek reflects on his contributions to quark-gluon plasma research and the use of CMS for heavy-ion detection. He cites the quality of his collaborators as the most important ingredient in his successful research endeavors, and he describes his involvement with the LHC and why he will always consider CERN his “mother Lab.” At the end of the interview, Wyslouch assesses how ongoing advances in technology, and in particular, computational techniques and algorithms, will continue to push forward fundamental advances in nuclear and particle physics.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Marshall Baker, professor of physics emeritus at the University of Washington. He recounts his childhood in Salem, Massachusetts, and he describes his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he majored in physics. Baker describes the formative influence of Julian Schwinger, and he discusses his first year of graduate school at Caltech, where he studied with Richard Feynman and Frederik Zachariasen. He explains his motivation to return to Harvard to complete his graduate research under Schwinger on the interactions of mesons and nucleons at low energy. Baker discusses his postdoctoral research at Stanford to be the “house theorist” for the Stanford Linear Accelerator and his collaborations with Shelly Glashow and Charlie Sommerfield. He describes his work as a junior faculty member at Stanford and the enjoyment he felt teaching quantum field theory as a student of both Feynman and Schwinger. Baker explains his decision to join the faculty at the University of Washington where he worked closely with Ken Johnson on quantum electrodynamics. Baker explains that his hire was part of a broader effort by the department to improve in elementary particle physics, and he describes the broader advances in the field during the 1960s in understanding hyperons and mesons and S-matrix theory. He explains the value of his collaborations with Soviet physicists and the significance of Gell-Mann’s quark model. Baker discusses his collaborations in the mid-1980s with Zachariasen on finding nonperturbative solutions for the gluon propagator which led to an approximate solution of QCD, he explains how a theoretical problem can take 15 years to solve and why the feedback mechanisms for success are more difficult to ascertain than is true in experimentation. Baker discusses his interest in string theory and Bari measurements in the years leading up to his retirement, and he explains why he remains hopeful that this research will yield fundamental understanding about the part of the field between a quark and an antiquark that produces the confining force. At the end of the interview, Baker emphasizes the importance of always staying in learning mode, because discovery in theory requires openness always to new fields of inquiry.

In this interview, AIP Oral Historian David Zierler interviews high energy physicist Sekazi Mtingwa. Mtingwa describes his upbringing in Atlanta, life under segregation as a child, and his early interests as a budding scientist. He discusses his undergraduate education at MIT, where he developed his interest in theoretical physics and became involved in student protests in the late 1960s. Mtingwa describes his graduate work at Princeton, the cultural differences he experienced there versus at MIT, and his dissertation, which focused on collisions of elementary particles at high energies. He describes his postdoc at the University of Rochester, and some of the changes he felt personally that led to his decision to change his name. Mtingwa discusses his work at Fermilab, where he worked on creating the Antiproton Source, and his decision to move to Argonne Lab to work on plasma wakefield accelerators. Mtingwa describes his decision to build up the physics program at North Carolina A&T and his work at Morgan State. At the end of the interview, Mtingwa discusses his work in recent years, which has included trips to Africa to expand science education, supporting minorities in science, and his service for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

In this interview Donald Geesaman discusses topics such as: Argonne National Laboratory; Dirk Walecka; hadron physics; Roy Holt; Herman Feshbach; Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC); Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC); Bernard Mecking; Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF); Gerry Garvey; quarks; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab); Jefferson Laboratory; nuclear physics; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Larry Cardman; Keith Baker; relativistic heavy ion (RHIC) experiments.

This interview is part of a group of interviews documenting the search for the top quark at Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). The interview with Shochet reveals how he got involved in high-energy physics; how he then became involved with the Collider Detector at FermiLab (1976), with Bob Wilson and Jim Cronin; how the detector was built, the decision-making process for designing the detector; work on the detector trigger, the general structure and then the detailed design; working as part of a collaboration and the small number of people working as part of the collaboration; discussion of the early physics working groups and heavy flavors groups; discussion of the top search; working with the silicon vertex detector; the writing of the paper that would later appear in Physical Review - the process and decision-making on the format; discussion of the top quark; discussion of D0 and its effects on CDF; what was learned from the data from the silicon vertex detector; how the spokesperson for the collaboration was chosen and the duties involved; his tenure as spokesperson.

In this interview, Mark Wise, John A. McCone Professor of High-Energy Physics at the California Institute of Technology, is interviewed by David Zierler. Wise recounts his childhood in Toronto, his early difficulties in school, and his interests in physics, which he studied as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto and was mentored by Nathan Isgur.  He describes the circumstances leading to his graduate admission at Stanford and how he became Fred Gilman’s student at SLAC where he worked on weak radiative hyperon decays and QCD corrections for effective Hamiltonian CP violating processes. Wise describes his postdoctoral work as a Harvard fellow and his excitement about SU(5) grand unification, his close collaboration with Joe Polchinski and how he developed an interest in cosmology. He explains his decision to join the faculty at Caltech, where he started to work with David Politzer, and his involvement in heavy quark effective theory and weak radiative B meson decays. Wise discusses the durability of the Standard Model and what advances might push physics, and in particular, astrophysics and cosmology, beyond the Standard Model. He discusses his hobby pursuit of finance and investing and he muses on the similarities in model-building in physics and financial economics. At the end of the interview, Wise reflects on his contributions and why particle physics allows the possibility for repetitious experiments in a way that astrophysics and cosmology do not, he describes his current interests in conformal Fermi coordinates, and he describes the moral obligation he feels to his graduate students to be the best mentor he can be. 

Telephone interview aired on WFMU and live on the internet. Popular-level discussion with brief comments on various contemporary topics in particle physics and cosmology, along with reminiscences of incidents in Glashow's youth and his work on quark theory.