Howard Wieman

Howard Henry Wieman
Howard Henry Wieman
Born	1942 (age 83–84); Oregon, USA
Alma mater	Oregon State University; University of Washington
Known for	STAR detector, Time Projection Chamber, Active-pixel sensor
Family	Carl Wieman + 3 more siblings; Henry Nelson Wieman;
Awards	Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics (2015); Fellow of the American Physical Society (2001); LBNL J.M. Nitschke Technical Excellence Award (1999);
	Scientific career
Fields	Physics, Nuclear Physics
Institutions	Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL); Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research (GSI); University of Colorado
Doctoral advisor	Isaac Halpern

Howard Henry Wieman is an experimental nuclear physicist specializing in instrumentation and detectors for high-energy nuclear physics.

In 2015, Wieman (LBNL) and Miklos Gyulassy (Columbia) were awarded the APS Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics.

Wieman is best known for leading the team that designed the STAR Time Projection Chamber (TPC) which was used to discover a new state of matter, the strongly interacting Quark-gluon plasma. The discovery was made at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The STAR TPC was built in Berkeley, installed at RHIC, and tested throughout 1998 and 1999. The first Gold-Gold collisions at RHIC were recorded by STAR with the TPC on June 12, 2000. Seven months later, in January 2001, the STAR collaboration published the first measurement of elliptic flow in ultra-relativistic Gold-Gold collisions which indicated that the collision zone at RHIC energies is behaving hydrodynamically and with significant thermalization. This was a key step in making the discovery of a strongly interacting Quark Gluon Plasma, and a perfect liquid, which was announced simultaneously in 2005 by BRAHMS, PHOBOS, PHENIX, and STAR.