Several individuals received awards in 2001 from the American Physical Society in recognition of their contributions to physics.
David J. Wineland won the Arthur Schawlow Prize. APS commended him for his “extraordinary range of pioneering studies combining trapped ions and lasers.” Wineland is a fellow and group leader of the ion storage group at NIST in Boulder, Colorado.
The Herbert P. Broida Prize was shared this year by David W. Chandler and Paul L. Houston for their “critical contributions to the investigation of vibrationally and rotationally resolved molecular photodissociation and reaction dynamics, in particular for the invention and development of the photofragment ion imaging method.” Chandler is a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories and Houston is the Peter J. W. Debye Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University.
John Ernest Pask received the Nicholas Metropolis Award for his “contributions to computational physics that included the formulation and implementation of a new finite-element-based method for solving the equations of density functional theory.” Pask is a postdoctoral research staff member in the condensed matter physics division of the physics and advanced technologies directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The 2000 Nicholson Medal for Humanitarian Service went to Marshall Rosenbluth for his “inspirational leadership and personal caring in the development of the skills and commitment of the succeeding generations of scientific leaders in plasma physics and for many years of continual successful promotion and participation in international scientific collaborations.” Rosenbluth is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, San Diego.
The 2001 Nicholson Medal recipient is D. Allan Bromley, the Sterling Professor of the Sciences in the physics department at Yale University, for his “roles as a research scientist, an outstanding teacher, a supportive mentor and colleague, a leader of the physics community in this country and worldwide, and adviser to governments.”
Christopher Monroe, an associate professor of physics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is the recipient of the I. I. Rabi Prize for his “pivotal experiments that implemented quantum logic using trapped atomic ions and for his fundamental studies of coherence and decoherence in entangled quantum systems.”
The Shock Compression Award went to Yogendra Gupta for his “many significant contributions to the mechanical, optical, and x-ray measurement of both continuum and microscopic aspects of shock waves in condensed matter.” Gupta is a professor of physics and the director of the Institute for Shock Physics at Washington State University.
Alex Zunger is the recipient of the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics for his “pioneering work on the computational basis for first-principles electronic structure theory of solids.” Zunger is a physicist and research fellow at DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.
The Fluid Dynamics Prize went this year to Howard Brenner, the Willard H. Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, for his “outstanding and sustained research in physico-chemical hydrodynamics, the quality of his monographs and textbooks, and his long-standing service to the fluid mechanics community.”
John Kim garnered the Otto Laporte Award for his “pioneering work in the development of direct numerical simulation as a tool in turbulence research and for his important contributions to the understanding of the physics and control of turbulent boundary layers.” Kim is the Rockwell International Professor in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA.
The James Clerk Maxwell Prize went to Roald Sagdeev, a Distinguished University Professor in the physics department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Sagdeev was cited for “an unmatched set of contributions to modern plasma theory including collisionless shocks, stochastic magnetic fields, ion temperature gradient instabilities, quasi-linear theory, neoclassical transport, and weak turbulence theory.”
The Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research was shared by Keith Burrell, Richard J. Groebner, Edward Doyle, and Edmund J. Synakowski for “experiments that show that sheared E X B flows can suppress turbulence and transport in tokamak plasmas and that such flows can spontaneously arise at the edge and in the core of tokamak plasmas.” Burrell is a senior technical adviser and Groebner is a principal scientist at General Atomics in San Diego, California. Doyle is a principal development engineer at UCLA. Synakowski is a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey.
Kevin Bowers is the winner of the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in Plasma Physics Award for his “comprehensive and insightful theories and simulations of electron series resonant (ESR) diodes and ESR surface-wave plasmas, which showed how distributed slow-wave excitation might produce large area plasma discharges for processing (and other) applications.” Bowers is a member of the technical staff in the opto-electro-mechanical integration group in the semiconductor research division of Agere Systems (formerly the Lucent Bell Labs Microelectronics Corp).
The winner of the Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award is Greg A. Voth for his thesis entitled “Lagrangian Acceleration Measurements in Turbulence at Large Reynolds Numbers.” Voth is a postdoctoral researcher in physics at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.
The recipient of the Atomic, Molecular or Optical Physics Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award is Thomas Weinacht a research associate at JILA, for his dissertation entitled “Using Feedback for Coherent Control of Quantum Systems.”
