Gilchriese, Murdock G. D.
Oral history interview with Murdock "Gil" Gilchriese, 2021 April 5.
Interview with Murdock Gilchriese, Senior Physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He discusses his contribution to the major project, LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) and the broader search for dark matter, he recounts his parents missionary work, and his upbringing in Los Angeles and then in Tucson. Gilchriese describes his early interests in science and his undergraduate experience at the University of Arizona, where he developed is expertise in experimental high energy physics. He discusses his graduate work at SLAC where he worked with Group B headed by David Leith, and he describes his research in hadron spectroscopy. Gilchriese explains his postdoctoral appointment at the University of Pennsylvania sited at Fermilab to do neutrino physics before he accepted his first faculty position at Cornell to help create an e+/e- collider and the CLEO experiment. He discusses the inherent risk of leaving Cornell to work for the SSC project with the central design group, and then as head of the Research Division. Gilchriese describes his subsequent work on the solenoidal detector and his transfer to Berkeley Lab to succeed George Trilling and to join the ATLAS collaboration. He explains the migration of talent and ideas from the SSC to CERN and discusses the research overlap of ATLAS and CMS and how this accelerated the discovery of the Higgs. Gilchriese describes his next interest in getting into cosmology and searching for dark matter as a deep underground science endeavor, and he explains why advances in the field have been so difficult to achieve. At the end of the interview, Gilchriese describes his current work on CMB-S4, his advisory work helping LBNL navigate the pandemic, and he reflects on the key advances in hardware that have pushed experimental physics forward during his career.
American physicist. Ph.D. physics, Stanford University (1977). LZ project director and emeritus physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Professional experience includes: faculty at Cornell University, scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Gilchriese, Murdock G. D.
Leith, David W. G. S.
Cornell University
Cornell University. CLEO Experiment -- History.
European Organization for Nuclear Research
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
University of Arizona
University of Pennsylvania
Dark matter (Astronomy)
Neutrinos
Neutrinos -- Experiments.
Particles (Nuclear physics)
Solenoids.
Superconducting Super Collider
LUX-ZEPLIN
LZ experiment
Interviews. aat
Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
Zierler, David, 1979-, interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library & Archives. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA