Three Brookhaven Lab Scientists Named American Physical Society Fellows

Three scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory - Bruce G. Gibbard, Alex Harris and Li-Hua Yu - have been named Fellows of the American Physical Society (APS), a professional organization with about 43,000 members. Election to APS Fellowship is limited to no more than one half of one percent of its membership in a given year, and election for this honor indicates recognition by scientific peers for outstanding contributions to physics. The Brookhaven scientists are among 201 Fellows elected in 2004.

Gibbard was recognized "For leadership in planning and implementing large-scale computing facilities for high-energy and nuclear physics."

From 1984 to 1997, Gibbard led the computing, software and data acquisition effort for the large D0 experiment at DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. In 1995, this experiment reported the discovery of the top quark, the final of six predicted quarks, which are fundamental building blocks of matter. In 1997, Gibbard became director of Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) Computing Facility. This facility contains 1,500 dual processor computers, which are used to translate digitalized signals from hundreds of thousands of detector elements in RHIC experiments into patterns from which scientists can gain insight into the fundamental nature of matter. Gibbard is also in charge of U.S. computing facilities for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European center for particle physics research. When fully functioning in 2008, ATLAS will analyze its data using a worldwide computing grid, with the primary U.S. computing facility located at Brookhaven Lab.

Gibbard earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan in 1970, and, from 1970 to 1972, he was a junior visiting scientist at CERN. In 1972, he became a research associate at Cornell University, and, in 1978, he joined Brookhaven as an associate physicist. He became the RHIC Computing Facility director in 1997 and the U.S. ATLAS Computing Facilities manager in 1999, the positions that he holds today.

Alex Harris was recognized "For his pioneering work in developing vibrational spectroscopy to probe ultra-fast dynamics at surfaces, and for elucidating the vibrational energy flow pathways of absorbates at solid surfaces."

Harris explained, "At Bell Labs, I developed techniques to study how energy flows between a molecule and solid surfaces, an important process during chemical reactions in catalysis or electronic device processing. That energy transfer often occurs on a time scale of picoseconds, or trillionths of a second. The studies therefore depended on ultrafast laser methods applied to surface science."

After receiving a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985, Harris became a member of the technical staff in Chemical Physics Research of AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey (later the Bell Laboratories research division of Lucent Technologies). He became department head of the Materials Chemistry Research Department in 1996. In 2000, he joined Agere Systems, Allentown, Pennsylvania, as director of the Guided Wave and Electro-optics Research Department, and, in 2003, he joined Brookhaven as chair of the Chemistry Department. At Brookhaven, Harris plans to continue his surface studies as part of the Surface Chemical Dynamics Group, which has recently been formed and is setting up initial experimental efforts.

Li-Hua Yu's citation reads: "For creative contributions to the theory of self-amplified spontaneous emissions [SASE] and high-gain harmonic generation [HGHG], and the experimental demonstration of the HGHG free electron laser."

Yu has contributed significantly in developing two types of lasers that are important for scientific research: the SASE laser and the HGHG laser. In the SASE process, the light the laser emits for experiments starts from noise, or random signals. In the HGHG process, the output light starts from fast-moving electrons interacting with a seeding laser that shifts light to a higher frequency and makes it significantly more coherent, meaning electrons move in a coordinated way to emit light. This light reveals the fine details of atomic interactions inside materials and the very fast motions of molecules in chemical reactions, all with unsurpassed precision.

In 1984, Yu earned a Ph.D. in physics from Stony Brook University and joined Brookhaven Lab as a research associate. He rose through the ranks to become a senior physicist in 2000. With Brookhaven colleagues, Yu won an R&D 100 Award from R&D Magazine in 1989 for inventing the Real-Time Harmonic Closed-Orbit Feedback System, which stabilizes the orbit of electron beams in synchrotrons. In 2003, he won the Free Electron Laser (FEL) Prize sponsored by the International FEL Conference.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.