Dr. Barry C. Barish

Biography

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 the faculty at the California Institute of Technology to establish a research program using the large frontier accelerators at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Especially noteworthy were the experiments he conducted at Fermilab using high-energy neutrinos that were important in demonstrating the quark substructure of the nucleon. In addition, his experiments played a major role in establishing the weak neutral current, the key prediction of the theories of the Electroweak Unification of Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg. These theories have since led to the Standard Model of particle physics, which remains the most successful framework for describing most of particle physics.

In the 1980s, Barish initiated an ambitious international effort to build a sophisticated underground detector to search for the magnetic monopole and solve other problems in the emerging area of particle astrophysics. Experiments conducted underground in Italy provided some of the key evidence that neutrinos have mass.

In 1994, he became the principal investigator of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project and three years later became director of the laboratory. Barish leads a team of scientists who have built two large facilities that will be used for detection and study of gravitational waves from astrophysical sources. The detectors are precision suspended mass laser interferometers that monitor motions of test masses separated by four kilometer baselines with a precision of 10-18 meter.

Barish served as co-chair of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel subpanel that developed a long-range plan for U.S. high energy physics. He has served as chair of the Commission of Particles and Fields of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and is currently chair of the U.S. Liaison committee to IUPAP.

In 1991, Barish was named the Maxine and Ronald Linde Professor of Physics at Caltech. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2002, he received the Klopsteg Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Barish was appointed to the National Science Board in 2002.

July 2004