Linde Professor of Physics
California Institute of
Technology
Pasadena, CA 91125 USA
Director International
Linear Collider – Global Design Effort
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Barry C. Barish grew up in
Southern California attending high school at Marshall High School in Los
Angeles.
Dr. Barish earned his
Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1957 and a Ph.D. in experimental high-energy
physics in 1963 from the University of California, Berkeley. At Caltech, Dr.
Barish helped develop a new high-energy physics program that utilized the
frontier particle accelerators. Among Dr. Barish's noteworthy experiments
were those at Fermilab using high-energy neutrinos to reveal the quark
substructure of the nucleon. These experiments were among the first to
observe the weak neutral current, a linchpin in the Electro-Weak Unification
theory of Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg.
In the 1980s, Barish
initiated an ambitious international effort to build a sophisticated
underground detector (MACRO) to search for the magnetic monopole and solve
other problems in the emerging area of particle astrophysics. The
experiments conducted underground in Italy provided some of the key evidence
that neutrinos have mass. Dr. Barish is presently involved in an experiment
at the Soudan Underground Mine in Minnesota (MINOS) to further study
neutrino properties.
Dr. Barish was named the
Maxine and Ronald Linde Professor of Physics in 1991. He became the
Principal Investigator of the LIGO project in 1994 and was appointed
Director of the LIGO Laboratory in 1997. LIGO is an NSF-funded, joint
Caltech-MIT collaboration to detect gravitational waves from distant sources
such as colliding black holes. The 4-kilometer LIGO interferometers, located
in rural Louisiana and Washington State, are designed to detect ripples in
space-time far smaller than the size of a proton. LIGO is well into its
commissioning and has taken initial data that has already produced some
improved limits on gravitational waves from astrophysics sources.
Dr. Barish served as
co-chair of the subpanel of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP)
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 2002 he received
the Klopsteg Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers and was
elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Barish chaired an NRC
panel, Neutrino Facilities Assessment Committee, in 2002 that produced the
NAS report, "Neutrinos and Beyond". In 2003, he is serving as a member of
the special panel for NASA that is considering the future of the Hubble
Space Telescope and the transition to the James Webb Space Telescope.
[October 2003]
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LAUREE AD HONOREM
