Prize Recipient

David Robert Nygren
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Citation:

"For the concept, development, and application of the time projection chamber (TPC), enabling unprecedented studies of complex topologies of charged particles produced in high energy collisions of interest to both high energy and nuclear physics."

Background:

Dr. Nygren received his BA degree in 1960 from Whitman College in Mathematics and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in Physics in 1967. He was a research associate at Nevis Laboratories at Columbia University and became an Associate Professor of physics at Columbia in 1969. He moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1973 as a Division Fellow and has been a Senior Physicist at LBNL since 1975.

Dr. Nygren has been instrumental in the development of the Time Projection Chamber concept for tracking and identification of charged particles in high energy electron-positron collisions. The TPC concept provides 3-dimensional images of complex events with high resolution, and simultaneously determines the charged particle types. Under his direction, the pioneering TPC at LBNL operated a the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center PEP storage ring from 1981 to 1989. The TPC concept has been employed in a wide range of applications as well as several other large detector systems in Japan and Europe.

Dr. Nygren is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a recipient of the E. O. Lawrence Award given by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, and most recently was a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He also has served on the Executive Committee for the APS Division of Particles and Fields, and several other distinguished, scientific panels and committees.

Selection Committee:

James E Pilcher (Chair), Jonathan L Rosner, Gail G Hanson ('96 Recipient), Michael Zeller (Vice Chair), Raymond L Brock