Sau Lan Wu Explained

Sau Lan Wu
Alma Mater:Vassar College
Thesis Title:Proton Compton scattering at high energies near the forward direction
Thesis Year:1970
Workplaces:
Fields:particle physics
Native Name:吳秀蘭
Native Name Lang:Traditional Chinese
Birth Date:Early 1940s
Birth Place:Hong Kong
Other Names:吴秀兰
Education:

Sau Lan Wu (Chinese: 吳秀蘭; born Hong Kong in the early 1940s) is a Chinese American particle physicist and the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She made important contributions towards the discovery of the J/psi particle, which provided experimental evidence for the existence of the charm quark, and the gluon, the vector boson of the strong force in the Standard Model of physics.[1] Recently, her team located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), using data collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was part of the international effort in the discovery of a boson consistent with the Higgs boson.[2]

Early years

Wu was born in the early 1940s during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and went to Vassar College in 1960 with a full scholarship for her undergraduate degree.[3] Initially, she dreamed of becoming a painter, but was inspired by Marie Curie to devote her life to physics. During her years in Vassar, she spent a summer at Brookhaven National Laboratory where the science of particle physics captivated her.[4]

Reminiscence of her years in Vassar, Wu relished the experience and recollected her adjustment to the American society and culture as a difficult but positive one. During her freshman year she and other Vassar students were invited to the White House for an Easter function and met Jacqueline Kennedy, a Vassar alumna (class of 1951). She first experienced racial discrimination when visiting the Supreme Court and was confronted with the choice of "black" or "white" on the door to the restroom.

Academic background

Wu graduated from Vassar College (1963) with a B.A. in Physics.[5] After earning an M.A. (1964) and a Ph.D. (1970) in Physics from Harvard University, she conducted research at MIT, DESY and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is now the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics. Since 1986, Wu has been the Visiting Scientist at CERN conducting research with the LHC as part of the ATLAS team.[6]

Achievements

J/psi

Wu was part of the team led by Samuel C.C. Ting at MIT who discovered the J/psi particle in 1974,[6] for which Ting was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Burton Richter.[7] The MIT team where Sau Lan Wu was a postdoc at the time took advantage of the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory with high-intensity proton beams, which bombarded a stationary target to produce showers of particles that were detected by particle detectors. They discovered a strong peak in electron-positron Invariant mass at an energy of 3.1 billion electron volts (GeV). This led them to suspect that they had discovered a new stable particle decaying into electron-positron pairs, the same one found by Richter at the SPEAR collider in the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Gluon

Wu was a key contributor to the discovery of the gluon, a particle that binds — or ‘glues’ — quarks together to form protons and neutrons.[8] For her effort, Wu and her collaborators were awarded the 1995 European Physical Society High Energy and Particle Physics Prize.[9] The smoking gun signature proving the existence of the gluon were the so-called ‘three jet events’ occurring in electron-positron annihilation into a quark-antiquark pair, where an additional gluon is radiated from one of the quarks, creating the third jet. In the late 1970s Wu joined the TASSO Collaboration that operated at the PETRA accelerator at DESY. In 1979 she published a paper with George Zobernig on a method of three-jet analysis in electron-positron annihilation,[10] that was used in the following publication with the entire TASSO Collaboration,[11] regarded as the first evidence of a gluon.

Higgs boson

Wu’s team in Wisconsin was the first American group to join the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN, in 1993,[12] however, her hunt for the Higgs Boson had started earlier at the Large Electron–Positron (LEP) Collider also at CERN. Together with other scientists at LEP they observed a number of Higgs boson candidates, but the observation was not statistically significant and they were only able to set a lower limit on the mass of the hypothetical Higgs Boson particle at 114.4 GeV (at the 95% confidence level).[13] In 2000 CERN had shut the LEP collider so that the Large Hadron Collider could be built in its place.

On July 4, 2012, following the immense efforts of the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations, CERN announced the discovery of a boson consistent with the predicted characters of Higgs boson with a mass of 125 GeV. This was a statistically significant discovery at the level of 5-sigma, a term meaning that the odds it occurred by chance are less than 1 in 3.5 million.[14] This discovery completes the Standard Model of particle physics which explains most of the phenomena in the visible Universe.[15] Wu is credited as a significant contributor to the discovery with her Wisconsin's group work on the two key decay channels that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson, the decay of the Higgs boson into two gamma-rays (H→ɣɣ), and the decay of the Higgs boson into four leptons (H→ZZ*→4ℓ).[16]

PhD Students

Wu has mentored 65 PhD students and several became successful academics themselves.

Honors

Further reading

External links

Notes and References

  1. Book: S. Braibant . G. Giacomelli . M. Spurio . 2009 . Particles and Fundamental Interactions: An Introduction to Particle Physics . 313–314 . . 978-94-007-2463-1.
  2. Web site: ATLAS and the Higgs. CERN. October 2012. 6 March 2013. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20130215192435/http://www.atlas.ch/news/2012/atlas-and-the-higgs.html. 15 February 2013.
  3. Web site: Sau Lan Wu's Three Major Physics Discoveries and Counting. Quanta Magazine. en. 2020-03-07.
  4. Web site: A Charmed Life. Dawson, Lindsay. Vassar Alumnae Quarterly. Summer 2003. 16 January 2013.
  5. Web site: The Joy of Discovery: Sau Lan Wu '63 - Vassar, the Alumnae/i Quarterly. vq.vassar.edu. 2020-03-07.
  6. Web site: Sau Lan Wu. Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics at UCLA. 16 March 2001. 16 January 2013.
  7. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1976. Nobel Prize. 6 March 2013.
  8. Ellis. John. Those were the days: discovering the gluon. CERN Courier. July 2009. 49. 6. 15–17.
  9. Web site: The High Energy and Particle Physics Prizes. European Physical Society. 6 March 2013.
  10. Wu. Sau Lan. Zobernig. Georg. 1979. A method of three-jet analysis in electron-positron annihilation. Z. Phys. C. en. 2. 2. 107–110. 10.1007/BF01474124. 121082519 . 0170-9739.
  11. TASSO Collaboration. 1979. Tests for planar events in electron-positron annihilation. Physics Letters B. 82. 1. 134–138. 10.1016/0370-2693(79)90444-1. 0370-2693.
  12. News: Overbye. Dennis. 2013-03-05. Chasing the Higgs. en-US. The New York Times. 2021-08-25. 0362-4331.
  13. 2003-07-17. Search for the Standard Model Higgs boson at LEP. Physics Letters B. en. 565. 61–75. 10.1016/S0370-2693(03)00614-2 . hep-ex/0306033 . 0370-2693. 11567/390137. free. Abbiendi . G. . 118929428 .
  14. Web site: When was the Higgs actually discovered?. Charley. Sarah. symmetry magazine. 3 July 2017 . en. 2020-03-07.
  15. Web site: A question of spin for the new boson. CERN. 6 March 2013. 6 March 2013. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20121206235458/http://public.web.cern.ch/public/. 6 December 2012.
  16. Web site: Meet Sau Lan Wu, the physicist who helped discover three fundamental particles. 5 April 2017. Massive Science. 2020-03-07.
  17. Book: Ignotofsky, Rachel . Women in Science . Ten Speed Press . Berkeley, CA . July 2016 . 978-1-60774-976-9.
  18. Book: This Little Scientist . 2018-09-25 . 978-1-5344-0108-2 . en. Holub . Joan . Little Simon .
  19. Web site: Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Immigrant Women Who Changed the World Rebel Girls . 2022-06-10 . www.rebelgirls.com . en-US.
  20. Book: Sirdeshpande, Rashmi . Rashmi Sirdeshpande . Illustrated by Annabel Tempest . How to Be Extraordinary . Puffin . August 2019 . 978-0-241-38540-1 .
  21. Web site: Small-Body Database Lookup . 2022-06-10 . ssd.jpl.nasa.gov.
  22. Web site: 2022-06-10 . Sau Lan Wu honored with named planet . 2022-06-11 . Department of Physics . en-US.
  23. Web site: IAU Minor Planet Center . 2022-06-10 . minorplanetcenter.net.