Gerson Goldhaber

Gerson Goldhaber ( born February 20, 1924 in Chemnitz, † July 19, 2010 in Berkeley, California ) was an American experimental particle physicists and astrophysicists.

Goldhaber graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem ( master's degree in 1947 ) and at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, where he received his doctorate in 1950. After that he was in New York until 1953 Instructor at Columbia University. From 1953 he was in Berkeley, where he was 1957/59 ( and 1975/76, 1984/85 ) Research Professor at the Miller Institute for Basic Research.

1960/61, he was a Fellow of the Ford Foundation at CERN in Geneva and from 1962 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he led a group with George Trilling to 1991 in experimental particle physics. 1972/73 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the ISR storage ring at CERN. At SLAC, he built in the 1960s with the SLAC - LBL other solenoidal Magnetic Detector. Mid-1970s, he discovered D- mesons, ie the lightest mesons with a charm quark, the Spear - storage ring at Stanford, where previously Burton Richter discovered the charm quark, which was thus confirmed.

Since 1991 he was a professor emeritus at Berkeley. Since 1990 he has worked with Saul Perlmutter at the distance determination with distant supernovae, a project that led to the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe and for the determination of the cosmological constant. He was most recently involved in the Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In 1977 he was California Scientist of the Year. 1976/77 he was Loeb Lecturer at Harvard. In 1991 he was awarded the Panofsky Prize. In 1977 he became a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and honorary degrees from the University of Stockholm (1986).