New Frontiers in Particle Physics

Among Dr. Barish's noteworthy experiments were those performed at Fermilab using high-energy neutrino collisions. These experiments were among the first to observe the weak neutral current, a linchpin of electroweak unification theories. Today he directs the Global Design Effort for the ILC, the highest priority future project for particle physics worldwide that promises to complement the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in exploring the TeV energy scale. In the 1980s, Barish initiated an ambitious international effort to build a sophisticated underground detector which provided some key evidence that neutrinos have mass. In 1994, he became principal investigator of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. As director of the LIGO Laboratory from 1997 to 2005, he led a team of scientists who built two facilities to detect and study gravitational waves from astrophysical sources. Dr. Barish is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts, and is a Fellow of AAAS and the American Physical Society. He earned his Ph.D. degree in experimental high energy physics at the University of California, Berkeley