Prescott, Charles.
Oral history interview with Charles Prescott, 2021 April 15.
Interview with Charles Prescott, Professor Emeritus at SLAC. Prescott discusses his activities in physics since retiring in 2006, and he conveys his interest in the muon anomaly results from the g-2 experiment at Fermilab in light of his longstanding work in spin physics. He offers a wide perspective on the creation of the Standard Model and when the field began to search for new physics beyond it, and he recounts his childhood in Oklahoma. Prescott discusses his undergraduate education at Rice and his interests in physics, and he describes the opportunities that led to his graduate admission to Caltech, where Bob Walker advised his thesis research on the eta meson. Prescott conveys the importance of Steve Weinbergs work on particle theory in the late 1960s, and he describes the circumstances that led him to SLAC after a brief appointment at UC Santa Cruz. He describes joining Group A, which was led by Dick Taylor, and how he organized the first parity violation experiment. He discusses the E95 and E122 experiments, and he describes early advances in understanding the nucleon sub-structure. Prescott explains his proposal to add polarized beams to the SLC and a new drift chamber for the SLD, and he discusses the origins of the DELCO collaboration. He describes his tenure as leader of Group A and then as Associate Director of the Research Division, and as chair of the International Spin Physics symposium. Prescott discusses his work on SLACs Enriched Xenon Observatory, and he prognosticates the poor political and budgetary prospects of future linear accelerators. At the end of the interview, Prescott reflects on receiving the Panofsky Prize, and he segments SLAC into its constituent historical eras as defined by the dominant experiments over the decades.
Charles Y. Prescott is a Professor Emeritus at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He completed his graduate studies at Caltech and joined SLAC after a brief time at UC Santa Cruz. At SLAC, Prescott served as leader of Group A and Associate Director of the Research Division.
Ballam, Joseph, 1917-1997
Bloom, E. (Elliott)
Breidenbach, Martin
Heusch, C. A. (Clemens A.)
Hughes, Vernon W.
Krisch, A. D.
Prescott, Charles.
Richter, Burton, 1931-
Sinclair, Charles K.
Taylor, Richard Edward, 1929-2018
Tollestrup, Alvin
Walker, R. L. (Robert Lee), 1919-2005
Weinberg, Steven, 1933-
California Institute of Technology
Palomar Observatory
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Stanford University
University of California, Santa Cruz
Drift chambers.
Gallium arsenide semiconductors.
Linear accelerators.
Particle theory.
Particles (Nuclear physics)
Standard model (Nuclear physics)
Stanford linear collider. phys-t
Weak interactions (Nuclear physics)
Xenon.
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