Roy F. Schwitters, (June 20, 1944 – January 10, 2023) was an American physicist who was professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin. He was formerly a professor of physics at

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

and

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...

, as well as director of the Superconducting Super Collider.

Education

Schwitters earned a B.S at MIT in 1966, and a Ph.D. there in 1971, with a dissertation titled, ''Pi Plus Meson Photoproduction from H with Linearly Polarized Photons at 12 GeV''. He conducted his doctoral research at the

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Departme ...

Career

Schwitters was a researcher involved with the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science's Moby Dick project at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator in the late 1960s. An early major accomplishment in Schwitters' career was to oversee the design and construction of the Cylindrical Wire Spark Chambers of the

Mark I (detector) The Mark I, also known as the SLAC- LBL Magnetic Detector, was a particle detector that operated at the interaction point of the SPEAR collider from 1973 to 1977. It was the first 4π detector, i.e. the first detector to uniformly cover as much of ...

experiment, which operated at the

interaction point In particle physics, an interaction point (IP) is the place where particles collide in an accelerator experiment. The ''nominal'' interaction point is the design position, which may differ from the ''real'' or ''physics'' interaction point, wher ...

of the SPEAR collider at the Stanford SLAC Laboratory from 1973 to 1977, and major involvement in the analysis and interpretation of the data that resulted in the discovery of the particle (which resulted in the Nobel prize for Burton Richter in 1976). A description of the discovery of the particle and his key role in this discovery is given by this article/talk from Burton Richter. Another major accomplishment in Schwitters' career was as a founding member and becoming the associate head in 1980 of the Collider Detector at Fermilab experiment, with significant involvement in managing the initial construction and development of CDF, leading up to the initial Run 0 commissioning run before any upgrades (1988-1989). Schwitters was director of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Waxahachie, Texas starting in 1989, and ending in October 1993 when the funding for its construction was terminated by Congress. During the events leading up to the project's cancellation, Schwitters was famously quoted, "The SSC is becoming the victim of the revenge of the C students." In a 2021 interview, he speculated that, had the project been completed, it would have led to the discovery of the

Higgs boson The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Stand ...

particle in Waxahachie 10 years before its eventual discovery at CERN's

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundred ...

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

and attracted an equivalent number of visitors to CERN's 120,000 per year. Beginning 2004, Schwitters led the University of Texas Maya Muon Tomography research team. From 2005 to 2011, he was the chair of the JASON Defense Advisory Group.

Awards, honors

1980: Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation. 1984: Elected Fellow, American Physical Society, Citation: ''For vital contributions to the discovery of the family of particles and of their properties; for leadership in developing the pp colliding beam physics program at FNAL and building the CDF detector.'' 1990: S.W. Richardson Foundation Regental Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Austin. 1996: Panofsky Prize, Citation: ''Gail Hanson and Roy Schwitters are honored for their separate contributions which together provided the first clear evidence that hadronic final states in e+ e- annihilation, which are largely composed of spin 0 and spin 1 particles, originate from the fragmentation of spin 1/2 quarks. Roy Schwitters used muon pair production to measure the polarization of the beams in the electron-positron storage ring SPEAR. He showed that the azimuthal distribution of high momentum hadrons in hadronic final states was the same as that observed for muon pairs, consistent with the origin of these hadrons from the fragmentation of spin 1/2 quarks.'' 1987: Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

References

External links

Schwitters' Web site at UT-Austin
* American Institute of Physicsbr>Oral History interview of Roy Schwitters
by David Zierler, May 8, 2020.
UT Maya Muon Group HomepageUT College of Natural Sciences: Faculty Death Notice and Remembrance
{{DEFAULTSORT:Schwitters, Roy 1944 births 2023 deaths Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Harvard University faculty Stanford University SLAC faculty University of Texas at Austin faculty 1944 births Winners of the Panofsky Prize Members of JASON (advisory group) Fellows of the American Physical Society Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences People from Seattle