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Lüth Appointed to SLAC Faculty
By Davide Castelvecchi
Vera Lüth (EC), a key member of the SLAC staff for the better part of
the last 30 years, has been appointed a full professor of research at
SLAC.
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| New faculty member Vera Luth.
(Photo by Diana Rogers) |
Lüth first came to SLAC as a post-doc in 1974. She had earned her D.Sc.
from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, for work she did at CERN
under Jack Steinberger’s guidance. At SLAC she joined Burton Richter’s
research group and took part in the Mark I and Mark II experiments,
first at the SPEAR and PEP storage rings and later at the SLC. Inspired
by experience gained during a sabbatical leave at CERN in 1984-85, she
participated in the design and construction of the first silicon vertex
detector for a colliding beam machine, an addition to the Mark II
detector at the SLC.
In 1992 Lüth joined the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Dallas,
Texas, where she was responsible for planning the experimental program
and for build-up of the research staff. After Congress decided to
terminate the SSC in 1993, Lüth returned to SLAC the following year,
joining the newly established BABAR
Collaboration. A year later she was
appointed Technical Coordinator. In this role she coordinated the large
international collaboration for the design and construction of the BABAR
detector.
Over the years, Lüth has served on advisory committees at several
laboratories and universities, more recently on the DOE/NSF High Energy
Physics Advisory Panel, and on the Large Facilities Panel of the German
Wissenschaftsrat, a committee that advised the German government of
their country’s top science priorities.
Throughout her career, Lüth’s main interest has been the study of weak
interactions. Her thesis was on charge-parity violation in neutral K
decays. At SLAC she was one of the lead authors of the measurements of
the (3095) and (3695) resonance properties and the first observation of
certain decay modes of charm mesons.
Recently, her research with BABAR
has focused on the understanding of
semileptonic B meson decays and on testing the Standard Model of
particle physics.
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