R. G. Hamish Robertson

University of Washington


Primary Section: 13, Physics
Membership Type:
Member (elected 2004)

Biosketch

Hamish Robertson is Boeing Distinguished Professor of Physics emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle.  His work has focused on the experimental study of the properties of neutrinos, and he contributed to the discovery in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory of flavor-conversion of electron neutrinos, a hallmark of neutrino oscillations and mass. Born in Ottawa, Canada, Dr. Robertson attended schools in Canada and England, graduating from Oxford University with a B.A. and M.A.  His 1971 Ph.D. from McMaster University was in experimental nuclear physics.   He went to Michigan State University as a postdoctoral fellow and remained on the faculty, becoming Professor of Physics in 1981. In that year he moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory to develop an experiment to measure the mass of the neutrino. Dr. Robertson took a Professorship at the University of Washington in 1994 shortly after the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory collaboration began. In 1997 he received the APS Tom W. Bonner Prize, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. 

Research Interests

Neutrino mass plays an important role both in cosmology and in particle physics.   The minimal standard model predicts it to be zero, but the discovery of neutrino oscillations shows it is not, which is the first contradiction to the standard model since it was devised.  However, oscillations do not yield an actual value for the mass, and Dr. Robertson continues the experimental study of the beta decay of tritium to determine it.  With Bowles, he developed the gaseous type of source still in use today in the KATRIN experiment.  He is now participating in a new experimental approach that makes use of cyclotron radiation as a precision tool for measuring the tritium spectrum and neutrino mass.

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