Panofsky Prize Awarded for SLAC Breakthrough
 Bill Ford (U. Colorado), John Jaros (SLAC) and Nigel Lockyer (U. Penn.) received the 2006 APS Panofsky Prize. |
Bill Ford (U. Colorado), John Jaros (SLAC), and Nigel Lockyer (U. Pennsylvania) have been awarded this year's APS Panofsky Prize for their pioneering work at the MAC and MARK II experiments at SLAC that led to the measurement of the unexpectedly long lifetime of B mesons in 1983.
Jaros originated the idea and built the first precision tracking detector (Mark II) for a colliding beam experiment designed to detect secondary vertices from the weak decay of particles with lifetimes close to 1 picosecond. Initially Jaros focused more on decays of tau leptons and charm particles and the development of the techniques for lifetime measurements, while Lockyer with the Mark II detector and Ford with the MAC detector pursued the analysis of B mesons which many of their colleagues thought was a hopeless task since theoretical prediction placed their lifetime at 0.1 picosecond, i.e. beyond the reach of observation.
In the end, Ford analyzed the lifetime results for MAC, and Lockyer and Jaros analyzed the results for Mark II. The long lifetime of B mesons is the primary ingredient of our current understanding of the basic structure of the CKM matrix, and a property of the B mesons that made the observation of mixing and CP violations at the B factories possible. The award of the Panofsky prize has been 20 years in coming and is a greatly appreciated recognition of this seminal work.
The Citations reads:
"For their leading contributions to the discovery of the long b-quark lifetime with the MAC and Mark II experiments at SLAC. The unexpectedly large value of the b-quark lifetime revealed the hierarchy of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix."
Congratulations to our colleagues!
