University of Colorado at Boulder physics Professor William Ford has been awarded the American Physical Society's 2006 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics.
Ford received the national award in recognition of his research to better understand the innermost workings of matter, especially the nature of radioactive decay. He has spent the better part of 30 years working on collider projects, including electron-positron annihilation experiments, from which findings have been used to help piece together clues about the early evolution of the universe.
"The physics department is proud of Professor Ford's recognition by the American Physical Society with this national award," said John Cumalat, chair of the physics department. "This award recognizes Bill's outstanding achievements in experimental particle physics."
Ford will share the prize with John Jaros, a physics professor at Stanford University, and Nigel Lockyer, a physics professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
To study the innermost workings of matter, scientists use combinations of linear and circular accelerators to drive electrons and positrons in opposite directions at the speed of light. The head-on collisions of these particles cause the creation of fast-moving and often short-lived particles that are studied by scientists.
The Panofsky Prize recognizes Ford's 1983 discovery at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center that the bottom quark, or b quark, has a longer half-life than was expected by scientists -- a millionth of a millionth of a second. Quarks are the basic building blocks of matter.
The discovery filled in the last missing piece of data needed to determine the hierarchy of weak charges among the six different "flavors" of quarks, according to Ford. It also opened the path to a definitive understanding of the matter-antimatter "CP" asymmetry in weak interactions.
"I am very pleased to have been chosen as the recipient of this award, and accept it on behalf of all my colleagues who contributed to the work for which the prize was awarded," Ford said.
Ford's research group, which includes a research professor, two post-doctoral students, two graduate students and three undergraduate students, currently is studying rare modes of B meson decay to develop a more complete picture of the particles and their interactions.
He joined the CU-Boulder faculty in 1976 and is currently the principal investigator of the high-energy physics group at CU-Boulder. He is working on an electron-positron annihilation experiment called "BaBar" at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University.
Ford earned his bachelor's degree in physics from Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., and his doctorate in physics from Princeton University.
The $5,000 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize was established in 1985 and is named after Wolfgang Panofsky, the long-time director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Ford will receive the award during an American Physical Society meeting in Dallas in April.