David G. Hitlin

• Member, FRA Board of Directors for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
• Professor of Physics, California Institute of Technology

David Hitlin received his B.A. (1963), M.A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1968) degrees from Columbia University. His thesis, with C.S. Wu, was on the determination of shapes and sizes of deformed nuclei using high resolution spectroscopy techniques with muonic X-rays. He was an Instructor at Columbia from 1967 through 1969.

Although trained in experimental nuclear physics, he switched to elementary particle physics, moving to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center as a Research Associate, where he worked in the Schwartz/Wojcicki group, participating in high precision studies of the weak decays of mesons, particularly measurements of CP violation parameters and semileptonic decay form factors, and in measurements of p interactions. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Physics at Stanford in 1972. 0LK0LK

In 1975 he returned to SLAC as an Assistant Professor, joining the Richter group and becoming involved in e+e- annihilation studies at the SPEAR storage ring, first with the Mark II experiment, where he led the construction of the liquid argon electromagnetic calorimeter, and commencing in 1978, with the Mark III experiment, for which he was Spokesman. His main research interests were in detailed studies of weak decays of charmed mesons and hadronic systems produced in J/ψ decays.

He moved to Caltech in 1979 as an Associate Professor, continuing his work with Mark III. He was a co-founder of the SLD experiment at the SLAC Linear Collider, which made precision measurements at the Z0 resonance and was System Manager for the SLD liquid argon calorimeter. When SPEAR was devoted entirely to synchrotron radiation studies, he continued his exploration of J/ψ, charm and τ physics with the BES collaboration in Beijing, which produced the highest precision measurement of the mass of the τ lepton, thereby resolving an apparent discrepancy with the Standard Model. He was appointed Professor of Physics in 1986.

He was instrumental in the approval of the PEP-II asymmetric e+e- storage ring at SLAC, and was founding Spokesman of the BABAR experiment at PEP-II, which established the existence CP-violating asymmetries in B0 meson decays. These continuing studies should for the first time provide an answer as to whether the Standard Model mechanism for CP violation is correct.

He is currently leading studies within the BABAR Collaboration exploring the next generation of B Factory physics opportunities and detectors.

Hitlin has been Principal Investigator of the Caltech High Energy Physics grant since 1994. He has served on the Program Advisory Committees of the SLAC, Fermilab, Cornell and Brookhaven laboratories, on the Argonne National Laboratory Advisory Panel for High Energy Physics, on the DOE Technical Advisory Panel on the University Program and on the Fastbus Standards Committee. He was Chairman of SLUO, the SLAC Users Organization, for three terms. He is currently a member of the High Energy Physics Advisory panel to the DOE and NSF. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.