Lawrence Sulak (born August 29, 1944) is an American

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

, currently the David M. Myers Distinguished Professor at

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...

. Some of Sulak's research has included

Higgs Higgs may refer to: Physics *Higgs boson, an elementary particle *Higgs mechanism, an explanation for electroweak symmetry breaking *Higgs field, a quantum field People *Alan Higgs (died 1979), English businessman and philanthropist *Blaine Higgs ...

detection at the

Compact Muon Solenoid The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland and France. The goal of the CMS experiment is to investigate a wide range ...

in the

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 ...

neutrino physics A neutrino ( ; denoted by the Greek letter ) is a fermion (an elementary particle with spin of ) that interacts only via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass is ...

astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the h ...

, and contributing work for the

Monopole, Astrophysics and Cosmic Ray Observatory MACRO (Monopole, Astrophysics and Cosmic Ray Observatory) was a particle physics experiment located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Abruzzo, Italy. MACRO was proposed by 6 scientific institutions in the United States and 6 Italian ins ...

. The 1986 book ''Second Creation'' on the history of modern particle physics by

Robert Crease Robert P. Crease (; born 22 October 1953 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a philosopher and historian of science best known for his work in performance theory and historical research on Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is currently the chairm ...

and Charles Mann opened with a description of being escorted by Larry Sulak down to the experimental halls of the

salt mine Salt mining extracts natural salt deposits from underground. The mined salt is usually in the form of halite (commonly known as rock salt), and extracted from evaporite formations. History Before the advent of the modern internal combustio ...

under

Lake Erie Lake Erie ( "eerie") is the fourth largest lake by surface area of the five Great Lakes in North America and the eleventh-largest globally. It is the southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume of the Great Lakes and therefore also has t ...

Ohio Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...

converted to a

proton decay In particle physics, proton decay is a hypothetical form of particle decay in which the proton decays into lighter subatomic particles, such as a neutral pion and a positron. The proton decay hypothesis was first formulated by Andrei Sakharov ...

detector designed by Sulak and the rest of the Irvine Michigan Brookhaven collaboration. The 1996 update of the book has replaced this description with another physicist led tour of another Sulak experimental collaboration effort on the

muon A muon ( ; from the Greek letter mu (μ) used to represent it) is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with an electric charge of −1 '' e'' and a spin of , but with a much greater mass. It is classified as a lepton. As wi ...

g-2 measurement at

Brookhaven National Laboratory Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base and Japanese internment c ...

. The earlier career achievements of Sulak after his PhD dissertation work in the early 1970s were described by

Peter Galison Peter Louis Galison (born May 17, 1955, New York) is an American historian and philosopher of science. He is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and physics at Harvard University. Biography Galison received his Ph. ...

in a history of

neutral currents Weak neutral current interactions are one of the ways in which subatomic particles can interact by means of the weak force. These interactions are mediated by the Z boson. The discovery of weak neutral currents was a significant step towa ...

which appeared in

Reviews of Modern Physics ''Reviews of Modern Physics'' (abbreviated RMP) is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Physical Society. It was established in 1929 and the current editor-in-chief is Michael Thoennessen. The journal publishes re ...

References

Living people Boston University faculty 21st-century American physicists Winners of the Panofsky Prize 1944 births {{US-physicist-stub