Helen Quinn

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Helen Quinn (born 1943) is an Australian-born particle physicist. 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 DESY (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.

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 the physics of quarks can be used 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

[edit] References

  • Interview about women in physics
  • R. D. Peccei, H. R. Quinn, CP conservation in the presence of pseudoparticles, Physical Review Letters, 38(1977) p. 1440.
  • T Appelquist, HR Quinn, Divergence cancellations in a simplified Weak Interaction Model," Physics Letters 39B: 229 (1972).
  • H Georgi, HR Quinn, S Weinberg, Hierarchy of interactions in Unified Gauge Theories, Physical Review Letters 33: 451 (1974).