Björn Wiik

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Björn Wiik
Born	February 17, 1937(1937-02-17) Bruvik, Norway
Died	February 26, 1999 (aged 62) Hamburg, Germany
Fields	Particle physics
Institutions	Stanford Linear Accelerator Center German Electron Synchrotron (DESY)

Björn Havard Wiik (born February 17, 1937 in Bruvik, Norway; died February 26, 1999 in Hamburg, Germany) was a Norwegian elementary particle physicist, noted for his role on the experiment that produced the first experimental evidence for gluons and for his influential role on later accelerator projects.

[edit] Biography

Björn Wiik lived in his home town Bruvik until he began his physics studies at Germany's Technical University of Darmstadt. In 1965, he got his doctorate degree there. Two years later he began working at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California. In 1972, Wiik returned to Germany, to the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg where, four years later, he was appointed lead scientist.

In 1978, Wiik and his collaborators began using DESY's newly commissioned PETRA electron-positron storage ring to look for hard-gluon bremsstrahlung events that would provide experimental support for the existence and role of gluons in mediating strong interactions among quarks. Wiik and his team soon observed and reported a type of event never described before: three particle-jets whose momenta lay in a plane. These results, widely believed to represent the after-effects of two quarks plus a gluon, were soon confirmed by many other groups. In 1995, the European Physical Society awarded its Prize for High Energy and Particle Physics to four physicists representing the TASSO Collaboration (Paul Söding, Bjørn Wiik, Günter Wolf, and Sau Lan Wu) for demonstrating the existence of the gluon.^[1]

Already during his stay at SLAC, Wiik had proposed a new type of particle accelerator, which would be based on colliding a beam of protons with a beam of electrons. In 1980, this idea took concrete form with the creation at DESY of the hadron-electron ring facility HERA). Wiik was also responsible for proposing and overseeing the implementation of a superconducting linear accelerator for Tera-electron-volt energies, TESLA.^[2]