Helen Quinn

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Helen Quinn was born in Australia in 1943. She went to school in Victoria, Australia and entered college at the University of Melbourne before moving to the USA and transferring to Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford in 1967, at a time when less than 2% of physicists were women. She did her postdoctoral work at the German Synchrotron Laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. She next spent seven years at Harvard University before returning to Stanford where she is now a Professor of Physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Some important contributions: Working with Howard Georgi and Steven Weinberg, Helen showed how the three types of particle interactions (strong, electromagnetic, and weak), which look very different as we see their impact in the world around us, become very similar in extremely high energy processes and so might be three aspects of a single unified force. She suggested a possible near symmetry of the universe (now known as Peccei-Quinn symmetry) to explain how strong interactions can maintain CP-symmetry (the symmetry between matter and antimatter) when weak interactions do not. One consequence of this theory is a particle known as the axion which has yet to be observed but is one candidate for the dark matter that pervades the Universe.

She showed how one can use the physics of quarks to predict certain aspects of the physics of hadrons (which are particles made from quarks) regardless of the details of the hadron’s structure (with Enrico Poggio and Steven Weinberg). This useful property is now known as quark-hadron duality.

Helen also works with elementary and high school teachers in California to make physics fun and exciting for students. She has given public talks in various countries on "The Missing Antimatter", in which she suggests that this area of research is promising.

[edit] Honors

Fellow and Past President, American Physical Society
Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
2000 Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy (with Howard Georgi and Jogesh Pati) for pioneering contributions to the quest for a unified theory of quarks and leptons and of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions
2004 Order of Australia recipient