Lawrence Sulak
 Fellow of the University Professors; David M. Myers Distinguished Professor and Professor of Physics, College of Arts and Sciences
B.A. Carnegie Mellon University; M.A., Ph.D. Princeton University
Professor Sulak's research focuses on exploring the micro-world of particle physics, seeking the unification of the four fundamental forces of nature. In the 1970s, he and his collaborators discovered neutral weak currents and were the first to observe elastic neutrino nucleon scattering, demonstrating that two of the four forces (weak and electromagnetic) are unified into an electroweak force. In the 1980s, Professor Sulak proposed a massive (10,000 ton) ring-imaging detector to search for the ultimate decay of matter, the predicted signal of the Grand Unification of the electroweak with the strong force. This detector not only disproved the simplest unifying theory, but also recorded an inexplicable absence of atmospheric neutrinos and the first neutrino outburst from the gravitational collapse of a star, verifying our model of supernova explosions. With an even larger detector built in the 1990s in Japan, Professor Sulak and collaborators showed that the atmospheric anomaly is the oscillation of neutrinos from one form to another, which can happen only if neutrinos have a small, but finite, mass. As the first indication of science beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, this discovery is one of the top three most frequently referenced experimental particle physics papers of all time. Professor Sulak has co-authored over 200 journal articles, receiving more than 7000 citations. He has been honored with the Outstanding Young Scientist Award by Science Digest, Fellowship in the American Physical Society, and (with his collaborators) the Bruno Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society.
Office Hours: To be announced- Contact: sulak@bu.edu
Telephone: 617-353-9454
Email: sulak@bu.edu
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