Experimental Physics: CU Professor Receives National Award

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.

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 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 also working on an electron-positron annihilation experiment called "BaBar" at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University.