Barry Barish
| Barry C. Barish | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
January 27, 1936 Omaha, Nebraska |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | Caltech |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
Barry Clark Barish (born January 27, 1936) is an American experimental physicist. He is a Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus at California Institute of Technology. He is a leading expert on gravitational waves.
Barry C. Barish was born in Omaha, Nebraska, grew up in southern California, and attended high school in Los Angeles. He earned his B.A. in physics (1957) and his Ph.D. in experimental high energy physics (1962) at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Caltech in 1963 as part of a new experimental effort in particle physics using frontier particle accelerators at the national laboratories.
Barish became the principal investigator of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in 1994 and director in 1997. He led the effort through the approval of funding by the NSF National Science Board in 1994, the construction and commissioning of the LIGO interferometers in Livingston, LA and Hanford, WA in 1997. He created the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which now numbers more than 1000 collaborators world-wide to carry out the science.
The initial LIGO detectors reached design sensitivity and set many limits on astrophysical sources. The Advanced LIGO proposal was developed while Barish was director, and he has continued to play a leading role in LIGO and Advanced LIGO. The first detection of the merger of two 30 solar mass black holes was made on Sept. 14, 2015. This represents the first direct detection of gravitational waves since they were predicted by Einstein in 1916 and the first ever observation of the merger of a pair of black holes. Barish delivered the first presentation on this discovery to a scientific audience at CERN on Feb 11, 2016, simultaneously with the public announcement.
Barish's other noteworthy experiments were those performed at Fermilab using high-energy neutrino collisions to reveal the quark substructure of the nucleon. These experiments were among the first to observe the weak neutral current, a linchpin of the electroweak unification theories of Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg.
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