APS Arthur H. Compton Award

2007 winners announced

The Arthur H. Compton award was established in 1995 by the APS Users Organization (APSUO) to recognize an important scientific or technical accomplishment at, or beneficial to, the Advanced Photon Source. The award consists of a certificate and $2500.

The awards are generally made at APS User Meetings, which are held every spring. A call for nominations is sent out four months before the meeting, and the winner is notified at least two months in advance and invited to give an award lecture at the meeting. Awards are not necessarily made each year.

Compton was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927 for discovering and explaining changes in x-ray wavelengths resulting from x-ray collisions with electrons, the so-called Compton effect. This important discovery in 1922 confirmed the dual nature (wave and particle) of electromagnetic radiation. A Ph.D. from Princeton University, Compton held many prominent positions including professor of physics at The University of Chicago and chairman of the committee of the National Academy of Sciences that studied the military potential of atomic energy. His position on that committee made Compton instrumental in initiating the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb.

Arthur H. Compton Awards

Award Date	Awardee(s)	Recognized for:
October 1995	Nikolai Vinokurov Klaus Halbach	Development of hybrid undulator x-ray sources.
April 1997	Philip M. Platzman Peter M. Eisenberger	Theoretical and experimental contributions to the fields of x-ray scattering.
October 1998	Donald H. Bilderback Andreas K. Freund Gordon S. Knapp Dennis M. Mills	Development of cryogenically cooled x-ray optics for handling undulator x-ray beams.
May 2000	Sunil K. Sinha	Development of the general theory of off-specular surface scattering.
October 2001	Wayne A. Hendrickson	Development and use of multiwavelength anomalous diffraction (MAD) methods.
April 2003	Martin Blume L. Doon Gibbs Denis McWhan Kazumichi Namikawa	Pioneering theoretical and experimental work in resonant magnetic x-ray scattering, which has led to important applications in condensed matter physics.
May 2005	Günter Schmahl Janos Kirz	Pioneering and developing the field of x-ray microscopy using Fresnel zone plates.
May 2007	Andrzej Joachimiak Gerold Rosenbaum	Pioneering advances and leadership in establishing the APS as a premier location worldwide for protein crystallography research

Photo of 2005 Compton Award winners.
2005 APS Arthur H. Compton Award winners: (l. to r.) Mark Rivers, outgoing APSUO Steering Committee Chairman; Janos Kirz; Günter Schmahl; and J. Murray Gibson, Associate Laboratory Director for the APS.