Prize Recipient

William T. Ford
University of Colorado, Boulder

Citation:

"For their leading contributions to the discovery of the long b-quark lifetime with the MAC and Mark II experiments at SLAC. The unexpectedly large value of the b-quark lifetime revealed the hierarchy of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix."

Background:

William Ford earned his B. A. degree in physics at Carleton College in 1963, and PhD. in physics at Princeton University in 1967, with a thesis setting a limit on direct CP violation in the three-pion decays of charged kaons. After postdoctoral positions at Princeton and Caltech, he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as Assistant Professor. With the HPWF collaboration at Fermilab he participated in the early observations in neutrino interactions of weak neutral currents and the dimuon signature for charm production. Since 1976 he has been a member of the physics faculty at the University of Colorado where he is a Professor. Most of his research in the last three decades has been in electron-positron annihilation experiments, with the MAC experiment at PEP, Mark II at SLC, CLEO at CESR and BaBar at PEP-II. He led the design and construction of the MAC tracking chamber and served as spokesman of the collaboration. He made measurements of the lifetimes of tau leptons and B hadrons, and of the weak neutral current asymmetry in muon pair production. His current emphasis is in B meson decays, where his group has discovered a number of charmless modes and measured their CP violation parameters. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Selection Committee:

Ian Shipsey (Chair), Jim Brau (12/05), Arie Bodek ('04 winner)(12/05), Hugh Montgomery (V. Chair)(12/06), Bob Cousins (12/06)