Bjørn Wiik

Bjørn Håvard Wiik ( born February 17, 1937 in Bruvik, Norway, † February 26, 1999 in Hamburg) was a Norwegian physicist and science managers.

Life

Wiik, whose father had a small furniture factory, lived in his home town of Norwegian Bruvik until 1956 to study physics at the Technical University of Darmstadt recorded, from which he graduated at the nuclear physicist Peter Brix with a doctorate. In 1965 he went to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center ( SLAC ) in Menlo Park, California, where he specialized in particle physics, a superconducting Mikrotron designed and worked at the newly opened electron-positron storage ring. In 1972, Wiik to the German Electron Synchrotron ( DESY) in Hamburg, and was four years later to become the leading scientists (lead scientist ) appointed. Wiik was one of the leading physicists in the collaboration Tasso, who succeeded in 1979, the first experimental evidence of gluons 3 -jet events.

During his stay at SLAC Wiik developed first ideas for a new type of particle accelerator, a super electron microscope, an electron beam head are associated with a proton beam collision in which to study the smallest building blocks of matter. The idea instead of electron-positron was to build storage rings electron-proton storage rings at that time new and proposed in 1972 by Wiik, Günter Wolf, H. Gehrke and H. Wiedemann for the DORIS storage ring, but it was not yet time to realization, as research to electron-positron collider (among discovery of charmonium ) promised greater progress. Also at CERN, where Wiik 1976, to conduct research, the project has not reached more than a study group ( CHEEP ), there was one proton -antiproton colliders preference. Only with the planning of the Hadron - Electron Ring facility ( HERA ) at DESY this idea took concrete form in 1980. As one of the HERA project manager, responsible for the proton accelerator complex, Wiik was instrumental in creating the largest research instrument of Germany, which began operating in 1992. Wiik considered the "father " of the HERA model. The project proposal for a superconducting linear accelerator for tera-electron volt energies, TESLA, also goes back to Wiik.

From 1993 until his accidental death Wiik was Chairman of the Executive Board of the German Electron Synchrotron. In addition, Wiik was from 1981 professor at the Institute for Experimental Physics II, University of Hamburg.

Writings

• Electron - positron interactions Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 1979

Prizes and awards

• Norsk Data - Physics Prize (1984 )
• Fellow of the American Physical Society (1990 )
• Member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences ( 1991)
• Member of the Norwegian Academy of Technical Sciences (1992 )
• Member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences (1992 )
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993 )
• High Energy Physics Prize of the European Physical Society (1995 ) awarded for the first experimental evidence of gluons at the PETRA storage ring at DESY
• Honorary Doctor of the University of Oslo (1997)
• Foreign Member ( Foreign Member ) of the Polish Academy of Sciences ( 1997)
• Honorary Professor of Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics, Krakow, Poland ( 1999)