4/22/2011 Celia Elliott
Randall Evan McClellan has been selected as the first recipient of the Maurice Goldhaber Research Scholar Award at the University of Illinois.
Written by Celia Elliott
Randall Evan McClellan has been selected by a faculty committee as the first recipient of the Maurice Goldhaber Research Scholar Award at the University of Illinois.
The award, which consists of a graduate research assistantship in nuclear physics plus discretionary professional development funds, was created to honor Dr. Maurice Goldhaber, a distinguished nuclear physicist who served on the Physics faculty at Illinois from 1938 to 1950. The new award was announced on April 18, 2011, Goldhaber’s centennial birthday.
“Dr. Goldhaber is one of the leading scientists of the 20th century in nuclear and particle physics,” said Professor Douglas Beck, the head of the University of Illinois Nuclear Physics Laboratory. “We are proud to count him among our former faculty. His work remains an outstanding example for us to follow, and I am delighted to say that in Evan, we have found an excellent candidate as the first Goldhaber Scholar,” Beck added.
McClellan grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, and received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Florida State University in 2009. As an undergraduate, McClellan gained significant research experience working at the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia.
At Illinois, McClellan is currently involved in building and testing some of the detector elements for the E-906/SeaQuest experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Fermilab E-906/SeaQuest is part of a continuing series of fixed-target Drell–Yan particle physics experiments to elucidate the antiquark structure of protons and neutrons. The experiment will extract a 120-GeV proton beam from the Fermilab Main Injector and guide it to collision with a fixed target.
“Evan is an extremely talented student,” said Professor Jen-Chieh Peng, his thesis adviser. “Since joining our group, he has made many contributions to hardware development and measurement strategies for a new experiment at Fermilab. He is a very worthy recipient of an award named for one of the pioneers in our field.”
McClellan is currently leading the effort to construct and install the hodoscope scintillators—the fast experimental components that will first detect the charged particles created by the collisions of the streaming protons with the liquid hydrogen and deuterium targets, triggering the more precise, but slower, wire-chambers. He has also proposed an alternative method to measure the antiquark distributions using quarkonium production and has carried out Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate the feasibility of the measurement.
McClellan will be stationed at Fermilab beginning in Fall 2011 to participate full-time in the commissioning and data-taking of E-906.
About the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at Illinois:
The Nuclear Physics Laboratory (NPL) group carries out research to determine how the nuclei of atoms form, interact, and decay. They seek to understand the fundamental nuclear forces in nature, their symmetries, and the resulting complex interactions between protons and neutrons in nuclei and among quarks inside hadrons. This large research group (nearly 40 faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate students) focuses on the development of state-of-the-art instrumentation and analysis to enable novel experimental approaches that will solve long-standing fundamental questions in nuclear physics.
The NPL group carries out experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Long Island, NY), Daya Bay (Dapeng, China), DESY (Hamburg, Germany), Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Batavia, IL), Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Newport News, VA), KEK (Tsukuba, Japan), and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, TN).
The NPL group created the Goldhaber Award in honor of Dr. Goldhaber’s centennial birthday celebration and to recognize the University of Illinois’ long-standing excellence in nuclear physics research. “The Goldhaber Scholar Award demonstrates our commitment to training the next generation of nuclear physics leaders,” said Beck.
About Maurice Goldhaber:
Goldhaber served on the faculty at the University of Illinois from 1938 to 1950. During his tenure in Urbana, Goldhaber worked on a wide range of research problems in nuclear physics, including excitation of nuclei with x-rays, resonant scattering of slow neutrons, nuclear decay schemes, and isomeric transitions.
In collaboration with his wife, Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber, Goldhaber demonstrated that beta rays are identical to atomic electrons. With Edward Teller, he developed the concept of coherent oscillations of the protons and neutrons in nuclei that lead to giant dipole resonance. In 1950, Goldhaber moved to Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he served as director of the laboratory from 1961 to 1973.
Among Goldhaber’s many awards are the Tom Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society, the Oppenheimer Memorial Prize, the Enrico Fermi Award, the U.S. National Medal of Science, and the Wolf Prize in Physics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Physical Society.