Brookhaven Scientists Named American Physical Society Fellows

Five scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, N.Y., have been named Fellows of the American Physical Society (APS). Tim Hallman, Chi-Chang Kao, Dmitri Kharzeev, William Morse and Yimei Zhu were elected in recognition of their outstanding contributions to physics. Senior physicist Hallman was recognized for his leadership of the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL. Since 2002, he has served as spokesperson for the STAR experiment at the collider, a scientific research facility that drives two intersecting beams of gold ions head-on to

Brookhaven scientists recently elected Fellows of the American Physical Society are (clockwise from left): Dmitri Kharzeev, Tim Hallman, William Morse, Yimei Zhu and Chi-Chang Kao.

study the early universe. Hallman joined Brookhaven as a physicist in 1996 and is currently the STAR Group Leader. Kao, chair of the lab’s National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) Department, was recognized for developing new x-ray scattering techniques to study the electronic and magnetic properties of certain materials, which have led to a better understanding of the Earth’s interior and materials properties under extreme conditions. Kao joined BNL in 1988 and has been a senior physicist since 2001. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University. Kharzeev, physicist, senior scientist and leader of Brookhaven’s Nuclear Theory Group, was elected for his research on quantum chromodynamics, a theory that describes the interactions of subatomic particles. Working with data from particle collisions at RHIC, Kharzeev’s group probes QGP, the type of matter expected to have existed at the first millionth of a second after the Big Bang. Kharzeev joined BNL in 1997. Morse was cited for his role as spokesman for the lab's muon anomalous magnetic moment experiment and his contributions to experimental particle physics. The Muon (g-2) Experiment was a project at BNL’s Alternating Gradient Synchrotron that investigated how the spin of a muon is affected as this type of subatomic particle moves through a magnetic field. The experiment’s findings challenged the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, a theory that describes the fundamental structure of matter. Morse was the resident spokesman of the experiment from 1991-2004. Morse joined the BNL physics department in 1976. Zhu, director of BNL’s Institute for Advanced Electron Microscopy and Group Leader for the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, was named for his work assessing the properties of materials that may lead to magneto-electronic devices on the scale of billionths of a meter for use in applications ranging from digital communication to data storage. His group performs research using state-of-the-art electron microscopes that can magnify a sample up to 50 million times its size. Zhu joined BNL in 1988 and became a senior scientist in 2002. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Department of Applied Physics and Mathematics and Stony Brook University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The scientists are among 212 APS Fellows elected in 2006.