Sikivie, P.
Oral history interview with Pierre Sikivie, 2021 January 20.
Interview with Pierre Sikivie, Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Florida. Sikivie explains how the social isolation imposed by the pandemic has been beneficial for his research, and he recounts his childhood in Belgium and his familys experiences during World War II. He discusses his undergraduate work and his natural inclination toward theoretical physics, and the opportunities that led to his graduate work at Yale under the mentorship of Feza G rsey. Sikivie explains that his initial interests were in elementary particle physics which was the topic of his research on Grand Unification and the E6 group. He describes his postdoctoral research at the University of Maryland where he worked on CP violation, and he explains his decision to pursue his next postdoctoral position at SLAC to work on non-Abelian classical theories. Sikivie explains that his interests in cosmology and astrophysics only developed during his subsequent work at CERN, and the circumstances that led to axion research becoming his academic focal point. He describes his appointment to the faculty at the University of Florida and when he became sure that axions would prove to be a career-long pursuit. He narrates his invention of the axion haloscope and how this research evolved into the ADMX collaboration. Sikivie explains why he was, and remains, optimistic about the centrality of axion research to the discovery of dark matter, and he discusses the import of QCD on axion physics over the past thirty years. At the end, Sikivie surveys some of the challenges working in a field whose promise remains in some way hypothetical but which nonetheless holds promise for fundamental discovery.
Pierre Sikivie is the Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Florida. He completed his graduate studies at Yale University and postdoctoral appointments at the University of Maryland and SLAC. Sikivie was previously a Senior Fellow at CERN.
G rsey, Feza
Sikivie, P.
European Organization for Nuclear Research
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
University of Florida
Yale University
Axions
Cosmology
CP violation (Nuclear physics)
Dark matter (Astronomy)
Grand unified theories (Nuclear physics)
Particles (Nuclear physics)
Quantum chromodynamics
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