James Lattimer

James Lattimer
Born (1950-04-12)April 12, 1950
Marion, Indiana
Alma mater University of Notre Dame
University of Texas at Austin
Awards Hans Bethe Prize 2015
Scientific career
Fields nuclear matter , neutron stars, r-process
Institutions Stony Brook University
Doctoral advisor David N. Schramm

James Lattimer (born 12 April 1950 in Marion, Indiana)[1] is a nuclear astrophysicist who works on the dense nuclear matter equation of state and neutron stars.

Career

Lattimer completed his BSc in 1972 at the University of Notre Dame and his PhD in 1976 at the University of Texas at Austin. After postdocs at the University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1979 he became a professor at Stony Brook University and in 2013 became a Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy.[2] He is an American Physical Society Fellow (2001), and has received a Guggenheim (J.S.) Fellowship (1999), a Sloan (Alfred P.) Fellowship (1982), and the Fullam (Ernest F.) Award from Dudley Observatory (1985).[3] In 2015, Lattimer was awarded the Hans Bethe Prize[4] for "outstanding theoretical work connecting observations of supernovae and neutron stars with neutrino emission and the equation of state of matter beyond nuclear density."

Research

Lattimer has made a number of fundamental contributions to the field of nuclear astrophysics, with a particular focus on neutron stars. One of his biggest impacts [5] was modeling the birth of neutron stars from supernovae in 1986 with then-research assistant professor Adam Burrows. This came just six months before the closest supernova in modern history (SN 1987A, in the LMC). Their paper [6] predicted the signature of neutrinos from supernovae that was subsequently validated by neutrino observations,[7][8] from SN 1987A on Feb. 23, 1987.

In work[9][10] that led to his PhD thesis, Lattimer and his advisor David N. Schramm first argued that the mergers of neutron stars and black holes would result in the ejection of neutron-rich matter in sufficient quantities to explain the origin of r-process elements such as gold and platinum. Later, with collaborators,[11] he demonstrated decompressing neutron-star matter from both neutron star-black hole and neutron star-neutron star mergers would form a natural r-process that would match observed patterns. Mass ejection and r-process nucleosynthesis from decompression has been apparently observed[12] in the aftermath of GW170817, the first merger of two neutron stars detected by LIGO/VIRGO.[13] The inferred r-process mass seems sufficient that neutron star mergers are likely the dominant source of these nuclides.

Lattimer and collaborators[14] also proposed that the recently observed[15] rapid cooling of the neutron star in the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant is the first direct evidence for superfluidity and superconductivity in neutron star interiors.[16]

References

  1. ↑ American Men and Women of Science, Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ Stony Brook Astronomy webpage
  3. ↑ Department of Physics and Astronomy Award List, Stony Brook University
  4. ↑ APS Hans A. Bethe Prize
  5. ↑ based on citations from the Astrophysics Data System
  6. ↑ Lattimer and Burrows, 1986, ApJ, 307, 178
  7. ↑ Bionta, Blewitt, Bratton, Casper and Ciocio, 1987, Phys. Rev. Lett., 58, 1494
  8. ↑ Hirata, Kajita, Koshiba, Nakahata and Oyama, 1987, Phys. Rev. Lett., 58, 1490
  9. ↑ Lattimer and Schramm, 1974, ApJLett, 192, 145
  10. ↑ Lattimer and Schramm, 1976, ApJ, 210, 549
  11. ↑ Lattimer, Mackie, Ravenhall and Schramm, 1977, ApJ, 213, 225
  12. ↑ Chornock, 2017, eprint arXiv:1710.05454
  13. ↑ Abbott, 2017, PRL 119, 161101
  14. ↑ Page, Prakash, Lattimer and Steiner, Phys. Rev. Lett., 2011, 106, 081101
  15. ↑ Heinke and Ho, 2010, ApJ, 719, 167
  16. ↑ NASA Press Release
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