Prize Recipient

Ikaros Bigi
University of Notre Dame

Citation:

"For pioneering theoretical insights that pointed the way to the very fruitful experimental study of CP violation in B decays, and for continuing contributions to the fields of CP and heavy flavor physics."

Background:

Ikaros Bigi has studied at the Universities of Munich, Oxford, Pavia and Stanford with scholarships from the Maximilianeum Foundation and the Scholarship Foundation of the German People. He received his Diploma and Ph.D. in 1973 and1977, respectively, from the University of Munich and his Habilitation in 1984 from the RWTH Aachen. He has worked at the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics, CERN, RWTH Aachen, University of Oregon, SLAC, Fermilab and since 1988 at the University of Notre Dame du Lac.

He has been awarded a Mercator Visiting Professorship at the University of Karlsruhe. His research has been in the phenomenology of the Standard Model and of New Physics, with emphasis on the mysteries of quark and lepton flavour dynamics, CP and microscopic T violation and its connection to baryogenesis. In unguarded moments he thinks about the meaning of quantum mechanics. He has benefited tremendously from the insights his colleagues have most generously shared with him, in particular Tony Sanda, Kolya Uraltsev, Misha Shifman, Arkady Vainshtein, Leo Stodolsky, Peter Zerwas and Lalit Sehgal. He is enjoying teaching and interacting with the wonderful students and young researchers he had the privilege to encounter during his career.

Selection Committee:

Boris Kayser (Chair), Lynne Orr (12/03), Alberto Sirlin ('02 Rcpnt) (12/03), Paul Langacker (Vice Chair) (12/04), Lance Dixon (12/04)