Gerson Goldhaber

Gerson Goldhaber
Gerson Goldhaber at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Born	(1924-02-20)February 20, 1924 Chemnitz, Germany
Died	July 19, 2010(2010-07-19) (aged 86) Berkeley, California
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Particle Physics, Cosmology
Institutions	Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater	M.Sc Hebrew University of Jerusalem Ph.D. University of Wisconsin–Madison
Academic advisors	M.Sc Thesis Advisor Ernst Alexander
Doctoral students	Anthony Barker, Umeshwar Joshi, Douglas Borden
Known for	Charm Meson Discovery, Dark Energy Discovery
Notable awards	Guggenheim Foundation Fellow

Gerson Goldhaber (February 20, 1924 – July 19, 2010) was a German-born American particle physicist and astrophysicist. He was one of the discoverers of the J/ψ meson which confirmed the existence of the charm quark. He worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with the Supernova Cosmology Project, and was a professor of physics emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley as well as a professor at Berkeley's graduate school in astrophysics.

Goldhaber was born on February 20, 1924 in Germany. His Jewish family fled Nazi Germany to Egypt and Goldhaber earned a master's degree in physics in 1947 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Goldhaber was awarded his Ph.D. in 1950 from the University of Wisconsin and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1953 while he was on the faculty of Columbia University.

Goldhaber became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and did additional work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At Berkeley, Goldhaber was part of a particle physics research team that used photographic emulsion to track the movements of subatomic particles in proton-proton scattering experiments that led to the identification of the antiproton, a discovery that earned Owen Chamberlain and Emilio G. Segrè the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959.

From 1960-61 Goldhaber was a Ford Foundation fellow at CERN, Geneva. During this period he co-authored with his wife and B. Peters a CERN report. A particle he discovered in 1963 was given the name A meson, named after his son Amos.