Shutt joins Case as Pytte Associate Professor of Physics
Will have “friendly race” to find
WIMPs with physicist Akerib
January 21, 2005 | For more information: Susan
Griffith (216)-368-1004
 Tom
Shutt has been appointed the first holder of the Agnar Pytte chair in
physics at Case Western Reserve University. The Pytte chair is named
in honor of Case President Emeritus Agnar Pytte,
who served as chair of the department of physics at Dartmouth College
prior to his presidency at Case. The Pytte chair was endowed by The
Sherman Fairchild Foundation upon Pytte´s retirement in 1999. The endowment supports an eminent scholar
in the areas of condensed matter physics, particle theory, particle
astrophysics or cosmology.
Shutt joins the department as an associate professor, having previously
been on the faculty of Princeton University. He
works in the area of particle astrophysics, bringing strength to Case´s Center for Education
and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics (CERCA).
Shutt will compete with his departmental colleague Daniel Akerib in
the race to discover experimental evidence for
the existence of weakly interactive massive particles (WIMPs). It is
thought that the visible matter in the universe is insufficient to produce
the gravitational effects we see. The search for WIMPs is part of the
scientific endeavor to locate the missing "“dark matter” in
the universe.
“Only one-tenth of the matter in galaxies is in the stars, dust
and planets,” said Shutt “Galaxies seem to be rotating too
fast to hold together if you just consider this mass. Ten times more
matter is needed to provide the gravitational ‘glue’ that
holds galaxies together.”
Shutt notes that something similar is seen on larger scales throughout
the universe: “Normal matter in stars and such seems to constitute
only one-tenth of the total mass that we know is there from its gravity.”
Shutt is a member of the XENON Project, a consortium of scientists
at Case, Columbia, Brown, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and the University
of Florida who are collaborating in the search for the dark matter in
the universe. The XENON project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
XENON scientists are designing a detector that will use liquid xenon
in an attempt to detect WIMPs. Once built, the detector will be housed
at the underground Gran Sasso Lab in Italy’s Apennine Mountains,
east of Rome. Shutt says they hope to have the detector up and running
within a year.
The hunt for WIMPs is also underway deep in the Soudan Mine in Minnesota,
where Akerib and nearly 50 members from 13 institutions
work together as the Cyrogenic Dark Matter Search II (CDMS II) team.
Both the XENON and the CDMS II teams are looking for a signal in the
form of electrons, light or heat that is given off when a WIMP collides
with the atoms in the detectors. The detectors are shielded against
radioactive noise and cosmic rays that might contaminate evidence of
the presence of a WIMP.
With his appointment to the Pytte chair, Shutt renews a collaboration
with Akerib that began at the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the
University of California, Berkeley, where the two physicists participated
in CDMS as postdoctoral fellows.Shutt received his doctoral degree in
physics in 1993 from UC Berkeley and his undergraduate degree from Texas
A & M University.
“I'm thrilled to have Tom here. He wonderfully complements the
existing program,” said Akerib. “Given our closely related
science goals, we will have the opportunity to work together again on
joint projects, including both CDMS and XENON, and take advantage of
synergies, each other's expertise and intellectual ties between members
of our groups.”
Case has one of the strongest particle astrophysics experimental programs
in the country. According to Lawrence Krauss, Ambrose Swasey Professor
of Physics and chair of the department, the personnel in the area include
four theorists and four experimentalists on the faculty, a dozen postdoctoral
fellows and another dozen graduate students.
In addition to hiring current Case graduate students for his research
group, Shutt will bring with him from Princeton
two, third-year graduate students, Eric Dahl and
John Kwong. He will also be joined by Alexander
Bolozdynya, a research associate who formerly worked with Akerib but
is now a member of the XENON team.
Shutt'´s research interests also extend to solar neutrinos. (The late
physicist Frederick Reines, who won a Nobel Prize for his discovery
of neutrinos, was professor and head of the physics department at Case
Institute of Technology from 1959 to 1966.)
There are three types, or “flavors,” of solar neutrinos,
Shutt explained. Those created in the burning reaction in the core of
the sun are electron-flavored. “But we have recently learned that
the neutrinos change flavor from electron to ‘muon’ or ‘tau’ as
they travel to Earth,” Shutt said. “This explains a long-standing
puzzle in that too few electron-type solar neutrinos are measured on
Earth.”
Neutrinos also provide a unique probe of the center of the Sun. They
are so tiny that most escape unhindered to the surface and beyond. Heat
from the Sun's core, by contrast, takes millions of years to diffuse
out to the surface, so that sunlight provides only an indirect probe
of the nuclear burning allowing for life on Earth.
“Tom will further broaden our particle astrophysics experimental
program through his work on neutrino physics and astrophysics,” said
Krauss. “He adds depth to our program in the experimental detection
of dark matter. With Akerib doing CDMS and Shutt doing a new XENON technology,
we will be involved in the two major ongoing initiatives in this area.”
About Case Western Reserve University
Case is among the nation's leading research institutions. Founded in 1826
and shaped by the unique merger of the Case Institute of Technology and Western
Reserve University, Case is distinguished by its strengths in education, research,
service, and experiential learning. Located in Cleveland, Case offers nationally
recognized programs in the Arts and Sciences, Dental Medicine, Engineering,
Law, Management, Medicine, Nursing, and Social Work. http://www.case.edu.
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