Herbert H. Chen

Herbert Hwa-sen Chen (Chinese: 陈华生) (March 16, 1942 – November 7, 1987) was a Chinese-born American theoretical and experimental physicist at the University of California at Irvine known for his contributions in the field of neutrino detection.

Chen's work on observations of elastic neutrino-electron scattering provided important experimental support for the electroweak theory of the standard model of particle physics.

[3] With an education supported almost entirely by scholarships, he subsequently earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1964.

[4] Chen then earned his doctorate in theoretical physics from Princeton University in 1968, writing his thesis on "Electromagnetic simulation of time reversal violation" under the supervision of Sam Treiman.

Reines had worked for the wartime Manhattan Project, and had discovered the neutrino in 1956, which would earn him a Nobel Prize in 1995,[9] and had helped found the new university at Irvine in 1966.

[8] Though trained in theoretical physics, Chen began a long-term experimental program for the development of methods to measure the properties of neutrinos.

Measurement of the elastic scattering was therefore a means to determine properties of the bosons, first detected at the particle physics laboratory CERN in 1983.

By verifying the quantum mechanical interference effects of the two modes of interaction, LAMPF experiment E-225 was an important test of Standard Model theory.

[20] As described by John Cramer, a professor of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, the final report of the committee was compiled by Chen.

The Sun is powered by nuclear fusion via the proton–proton chain reaction, which converts four protons into alpha particles, neutrinos, positrons, and energy.

In the late 1960s, Ray Davis and John N. Bahcall designed the Homestake Experiment to measure the flux of neutrinos from the Sun.

Chen and others formed the research team that designed the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) to exploit the idea of his seminal paper.

[30] The initial problem Chen and the collaboration addressed was the acquisition of 1000 tones of heavy water from the Canadian nuclear power company Atomic Energy of Canada Limited that would be used as the detector.

A keynote speaker was Nobel laureate and astrophysicist William Fowler, who led a discussion on "Herb Chen and Solar Neutrinos.