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Dr. Barry C. Barish
Physics
B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1957
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1962 |
Barry C. Barish was born in Omaha,
Nebraska, grew up in southern California, and attended high school
in Los Angeles. He earned his B.A. in physics (1957) and his Ph.D.
in experimental high energy physics (1962) at the University of
California, Berkeley. He joined the faculty at the California Institute
of Technology to establish a research program using the large frontier
accelerators at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab, and the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Especially noteworthy were the
experiments he conducted at Fermilab using high-energy neutrinos
that were important in demonstrating the quark substructure of the
nucleon. In addition, his experiments played a major role in establishing
the weak neutral current, the key prediction of the theories of
the Electroweak Unification of Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg. These
theories have since led to the Standard Model of particle physics,
which remains the most successful framework for describing most
of particle physics.
In the 1980s, Barish initiated an ambitious international effort
to build a sophisticated underground detector to search for the
magnetic monopole and solve other problems in the emerging area
of particle astrophysics. Experiments conducted underground in Italy
provided some of the key evidence that neutrinos have mass.
In 1994, he became the principal investigator of the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project and three years later
became director of the laboratory. Barish leads a team of scientists
who have built two large facilities that will be used for detection
and study of gravitational waves from astrophysical sources. The
detectors are precision suspended mass laser interferometers that
monitor motions of test masses separated by four kilometer baselines
with a precision of 10–18 meter.
Barish served as co-chair of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel
subpanel that developed a long-range plan for U.S. high energy physics.
He has served as chair of the Commission of Particles and Fields
of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and
is currently chair of the U.S. Liaison committee to IUPAP.
In 1991, Barish was named the Maxine and Ronald Linde Professor
of Physics at Caltech. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society
and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In
2002, he received the Klopsteg Award of the American Association
of Physics Teachers and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Barish was appointed to the National Science Board in 2002.
July 2004
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