Paul Buford Price (1932 – 2021), usually known as P. Buford Price, was a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

in the Graduate School at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

and a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, 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 Nati ...

. His work had been wide-ranging over his career, but began with the study of

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

and included

cosmic rays Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own ...

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 ...

nuclear physics Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies atomic nuclei and their constituents and interactions, in addition to the study of other forms of nuclear matter. Nuclear physics should not be confused with atomic physics, which studies the ...

glaciology Glaciology (; ) is the scientific study of glaciers, or more generally ice and natural phenomena that involve ice. Glaciology is an interdisciplinary Earth science that integrates geophysics, geology, physical geography, geomorphology, climato ...

climatology Climatology (from Greek , ''klima'', "place, zone"; and , '' -logia'') or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. This modern field of stud ...

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

in extreme environments, and origins of life. He was born November 8, 1932 in Memphis, TN and died December 28, 2021.

Biography

In the early part of his career, he codeveloped techniques to record the motions of energetic charged particles in solids, in particular plastics. The technique involves the fact that ionizing particles that traverse materials such as

Lexan Polycarbonates (PC) are a group of thermoplastic polymers containing carbonate groups in their chemical structures. Polycarbonates used in engineering are strong, tough materials, and some grades are optically transparent. They are easily work ...

plastic break chemical bonds, weakening the material along the path of the particle. By placing the material in a dissolving solution such as caustic

sodium hydroxide Sodium hydroxide, also known as lye and caustic soda, is an inorganic compound with the formula NaOH. It is a white solid ionic compound consisting of sodium cations and hydroxide anions . Sodium hydroxide is a highly caustic base and alkali ...

, the damage can be dissolved away etched" revealing the ionization damage. The greater the damage, the faster is the etching. The technique has been used in a number of applications. On the one hand, inspection of the tracks is a valuable tool in determining properties of charged particles as e.g. cosmic rays. On the other hand, the number of such tracks in natural glasses and minerals can be used for

fission track dating Fission track dating is a radiometric dating technique based on analyses of the damage trails, or tracks, left by fission fragments in certain uranium-bearing minerals and glasses. Fission-track dating is a relatively simple method of radiomet ...

of the substance. A more practical application is the creation of

nucleopore filter A nuclepore filter (brand name Nuclepore from Whatman, part of GE Healthcare) is a kind of filter in which holes a few micrometres in size have been created in a plastic (e.g. polycarbonate) membrane. These filters are generally created by exposing ...

s, widely used in microbiology. To create nucleopore filters, the technique is applied to a polycarbonate film and the etching is allowed to continue from both sides of a sheet of plastic until the two holes are connected, resulting in a tiny hole in the sheet. Continuous dissolving thereafter slowly and predictably widens the hole diameter until the desired diameter is obtained. Use of the technique in an experiment carried by a high-altitude balloon in 1975 resulted in the detection of one highly anomalous cosmic ray particle that traversed a stack of 32 sheets of Lexan plastic. The particle was tentatively identified as a

magnetic monopole In particle physics, a magnetic monopole is a hypothetical elementary particle that is an isolated magnet with only one magnetic pole (a north pole without a south pole or vice versa). A magnetic monopole would have a net north or south "magneti ...

in 1975 by Price and some colleagues. That conclusion was withdrawn in 1978 after further analysis led the Price group to conclude that the particle did not have the appropriate charge to be a monopole, though leaving open the possibility that a supermassive magnetic monopole might have caused the track. However, Luis W. Alvarez proposed that this track can be explained with a platinum atom decaying into osmium and later into tantalum. Price was a founding member of the team that constructed the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array and is presently associated with the

IceCube Neutrino Detector The IceCube Neutrino Observatory (or simply IceCube) is a neutrino observatory constructed at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. The project is a recognized CERN experiment (RE10). Its thousands of sensors are located under t ...

. During his work with AMANDA, he showed that micrometre-size bacteria and archaea can live in liquid veins throughout depths of several kilometers in glacial ice. In 1971, he received the Ernest O. Lawrence Medal with Robert Walker and Robert Fleischer for work on understanding how to capture charged particle tracts in solids. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Price, P. Buford 1932 births 2021 deaths 21st-century American physicists American nuclear physicists Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences University of California, Berkeley faculty People from Memphis, Tennessee