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William Allen Zajc | |
|---|---|
 William A. Zajc | |
| Born | (1953-11-14)November 14, 1953 (age 72) Barstow, California, U.S. |
| Alma mater | California Institute of Technology (B.S.),University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics,Nuclear physics,Heavy ion physics |
William Allen Zajc/ˈzaɪts/ is a U.S.physicist and theI.I. Rabi Professor of Physics atColumbia University in New York, USA, where he has worked since 1987.[1]
Born in Barstow, California, on November 14, 1953, and raised in Brookfield, Wisconsin, he received his bachelor's degree from theCalifornia Institute of Technology in 1975. He went on to the doctoral program in physics at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, where, as his thesis topic, he became the first person to useHanbury-Brown Twiss correlations to measure the size of the interacting region between two colliding heavy ions.
From 1982 to 1986 he was first apost-doctoral fellow and then a professor at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. In 1987 he accepted a professorship at Columbia University, where he has remained as a professor ever since. He has been a scientific leader in the field ofheavy ion physics since early in his career, and he has performed extensive service for the broadernuclear physics community in the U.S. William A. Zajc was named a Fellow of theAmerican Physical Society in 1997 and a Fellow of theAAAS in 2012.[2]
Since the 1980s, his research has focused on experiments performed atBrookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, New York, first at theAlternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) and now at theRelativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). He was co-spokesperson of the AGS E859 experiment, which investigated strangeness production in heavy ion collisions, and later spokesperson of the PHENIX experiment at RHIC from 1997 to 2006.PHENIX is a multinational collaboration with over 500 scientists from more than a dozen countries and is one of the two large experiments atRHIC. PHENIX, along with three otherRHIC experiments, determined that the relativistic heavy ion collisions at RHIC were successful in creating thequark–gluon plasma (QGP), a state of matter believed to have existed approximately 10 microseconds after theBig Bang. The RHIC experiments also discovered that this matter is in fact strongly interacting and nearly a perfect fluid. Since stepping down after nine years of dedicated service as spokesperson of PHENIX, he continues his research with the experiment, further characterizing the hot, dense matter formed in the collisions.
Zajc teaches quantum mechanics at the graduate level and introductory physics courses for science and engineering majors, including a new course entitled "String Theory for Undergraduates". He served as chair of theColumbia University Physics Department from 2009 through 2013.
