Lawrence Sulak

LAWRENCE R. SULAK

Myers Distinguished Professor, Boston University, Chairman Emeritus. Ph.D. Princeton with Val Fitch (Nobel Laureate for discovery of matter-antimatter asymmetry).

Sulak explores the micro-world of particle physics, seeking experimental signatures of the unification of the fundamental forces. In the early 70’s, he and his collaborators at Harvard demonstrated that two of the four forces (electromagnetism and radioactivity) are unified into the electroweak force.

With his coworkers, he was the first to observe, independently of a group in Japan, a neutrino outburst from the gravitational collapse of a star. This verified the model of supernova explosions and of nuclear bombs. With US and Japanese collaborators, Sulak showed that neutrinos oscillate from one form to another and that they have mass. Until the recent discovery of the Higgs particle, to which his forward calorimeter contributed, this was the most referenced experimental particle physics paper of all time.

Last July 4, Sulak and his collaborators at the CERN Lab in Geneva announced the discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson, the particle that has been hypothesized for half a century to be responsible for mass. This work garnered over a billion hits on the CERN website.

Sulak has authored over 400 journal articles that have earned over 18,000 citations. He has been honored with the Science Digest Outstanding Young Scientist Award, Fellowship in the American Physical Society, the Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Marseille Research Prize, the Asahi Prize, and has been a Guggenheim fellow.