Nicholas P. Samios (born March 15, 1932, in NYC) is an American physicist and former director of the

Brookhaven National Laboratory Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratories, United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, New York, a hamlet of the Brookhaven, New York, Town of Brookhaven. It w ...

Upton, New York Upton is a hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) located on Eastern Long Island in the town of Brookhaven in Suffolk County, New York, United States. It is the home of the Brookhaven National Laboratory and a National Weather Service (NWS) We ...

Biography

He majored in physics at

Columbia College of Columbia University Columbia College is the oldest Undergraduate education#United States system, undergraduate college of Columbia University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the ...

, from which he graduated in 1953; he earned his PhD at Columbia in 1957. He worked on the Columbia faculty for three years before joining Brookhaven's physics department, where he was appointed laboratory director in May 1982. A major achievement of his tenure was the construction of the RHIC, the first heavy-ion collider. He stepped down as director in 1997 after a dispute on leaked radioactivity in the laboratory, but continued to work as a researcher. In 2003 he became director of the ''RIKEN BNL Research Center''.

Scientific achievements

Samios has specialized in the physics of high-energy particles. He is especially known for his study of elementary particles, in particular for the discovery of the Omega minus particle in 1964 as postulated by

Murray Gell-Mann Murray Gell-Mann (; September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American theoretical physicist who played a preeminent role in the development of the theory of elementary particles. Gell-Mann introduced the concept of quarks as the funda ...

and

Yuval Ne'eman Yuval Ne'eman (; 14 May 1925 – 26 April 2006) was an Israeli theoretical physicist, military scientist, and politician. He was Minister of Science and Development in the 1980s and early 1990s. He was the President of Tel Aviv University ...

, as well as the first

charmed baryon Charmed baryons are a category of composite particles comprising all baryons made of at least one charm quark. Since their first observation in the 1970s, a large number of distinct charmed baryon states have been identified. Observed charmed bary ...

. These discoveries have contributed to the understanding of the spectrum of particles and have carried to the formulation of

Quantum Chromodynamics In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the study of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons. Quarks are fundamental particles that make up composite hadrons such as the proton, neutron and pion. QCD is a type of ...

and the

Standard Model The Standard Model of particle physics is the Scientific theory, theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces (electromagnetism, electromagnetic, weak interaction, weak and strong interactions – excluding gravity) in the unive ...

of particle physics.

Awards

*1980

Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award was established in 1959 in honor of Ernest Lawrence, a scientist who helped elevate United States, American physics to the status of world leader in the field. Lawrence was the inventor of the cyclotron, an parti ...

*1982 Member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

*1993

Panofsky Prize The Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics is an annual prize of the American Physical Society. It is given to recognize and encourage outstanding achievements in experimental particle physics, and is open to scientists of any nation. It w ...

*2009 Gian Carlo Wick Gold Medal

Biography

Scientific achievements

Awards

References

Further reading