Douglas H. Beck
Professor of Physics
Professor Beck received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Saskatchewan in 1979, and his Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986. After working as a senior research fellow at the California Institute of Technology for two years, he joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois as an assistant professor in 1989. He was promoted to associate professor in 1994 and to full professor in 1999.
Professor Beck is the creator, spokesman, principal driving force, and intellectual leader of the G0 experiment at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. This collaboration of more than 80 senior physicists from 18 institutions is designed to elucidate a detailed spatial distribution of charge and current densities for strange quarks. The Illinois group, under Professor Beck's leadership, is responsible for the main instrumentation for the experiment, a superconducting toroidal spectrometer. The $2M magnet for the spectrometer was designed and tested at Illinois before being successfully installed at JLab. The eight internal lead collimators for the magnet were also assembled and tested at Illinois.
Research areas: Experimental nuclear and particle physics; nucleon structure; fundamental symmetries; electric dipole moments.
Current Research
My current research program is focused on the structure of the nucleon and few-body systems. I was co-spokesperson of the SAMPLE experiment at
the MIT-Bates Laboratory, which measured both the weak proton magnetic moment and the transition anapole moment of deuterium for the first time.
The magnetic moment is directly sensitive to the contribution of strange quarks—and hence the quark sea—to the low energy structure
of the proton. These measurements led to the G0 Experiment at Jefferson Lab, of which I am spokesperson. This experiment will extend the
SAMPLE measurements by separating the weak neutral current charge and magnetic form factors of the proton over a range of momentum transfers.
I also participate in measurements of high energy deuteron photodistintegration at Jefferson Lab, which looks for definitive quark effects
in nuclei.
Selected Publications
Armstrong, DS, et al. (G0 Collaboration). Strange-quark contributions to parity-violating asymmetries in the forward G0 electron-proton scattering experiment. Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 092001-1-5 (2005).
Roos, P, et al. (G0 Collaboration). The G0 experiment: parity violation in e-N elastic scattering. Eur. Phys. J. A 24, 59-63 (2005).
Christy, ME, et al. Measurements of electron-proton elastic cross sections for
0.4 < Q2 < 5.5 (GeV/c)2.
Phys. Rev. C 70, 015206-1-15 (2004).
Ito, TM, et al. Parity violating electron deuteron scattering and the proton's neutral weak axial vector form-factor. Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 102003-1-4 (2004).
Beck, DH. The neutral weak current of the nucleon. Proc. of the Quarks in Hadrons and Nuclei. Intl. School of Nuclear Physics.
Erice, Italy, Sept. 16-24, 2002. Progress in Particle & Nuclear Physics 429-449 (2003).
Honors and Awards
- Arnold T. Nordsieck Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2007
- Fellow, American Physical Society, 2002
- University Scholar, University of Illinois, 2001
- Young Investigator Award, National Science Foundation, 1992
- Fellow, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 1991
