June 2008
Carnegie Mellon Graduate Student Mike Williams won the 2008
CEBAF Thesis Prize at the Thomas Jefferson National
Accelerator Facility in Newport News, VA. His Ph.D. thesis,
"Measurement of Differential Cross Sections and Spin Density
Matrix Elements along with a Partial Wave Analysis for
gamma p -> p omega using CLAS at Jefferson Lab" analyzed
about 20 terrabytes of data from the CLAS detector to extract
and analyze his signal. His work increases by several orders of
magnitude the inoformation on this reaction and is especially
important for a long-standing problem in nuclear physics on
the expected number of excited states of the proton and neutron.
His work may have identified some of these so-called missing states.
Mike worked with Professor Curtis Meyer in the experimental medium
energy physics group, and since completing his thesis, is continuing
on at Carnegie Mellon as a post doctoral researcher as part of a
Physics at the Information Frontier grant from the National Science
Foundation.