P. Buford Price

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dr. Paul Buford Price, usually known as P. Buford Price, is a professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His work has been wide ranging over his career, but began with the study of physics and has included cosmic rays, astrophysics, nuclear physics, glaciology, climatology, biology in extreme environments, and origins of life.

In the early part of his career, he developed techniques to record the motions of energetic charged particles in plastic (widely used in the study of cosmic rays) and to create nucleopore filters (widely used in microbiology). The technique involves the fact that ionizing particles that traverse materials such as Lexan plastic break chemical bonds, weakening the material along the path of the particle. By placing the material in a dissolving solution such as caustic sodium hydroxide, the damage can be dissolved away ["etched"], revealing the ionization damage. The greater the damage, the faster is the etching. To create nucleopore filters, the dissolving is allowed to continue from both sides of a sheet of plastic until the two holes are connected, resulting in a tiny hole in the sheet. Continuous dissolving thereafter slowly widens the hole diameter until the desired diameter is obtained.

This technique resulted in detection of one highly anomalous cosmic ray particle that traversed a stack of 32 sheets of Lexan plastic slung under a high-altitude balloon that was tentatively identified as a magnetic monopole in 1975 by Dr. Price and colleagues.^[1][2]

Dr. Price was a founding member of the team that constructed the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array and is presently associated with the IceCube Neutrino Detector.

[edit] References

1. ^ Time magazine, August 25, 1975, "Bring it Back Alive"
2. ^ "Evidence for the Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole", Physical. Review. Letters,. Vol. 35. (1975)