Physics professor wins Sloan Fellowship

Petar Maksimovic, an assistant professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University, has been awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship for his work in the field of particle physics.

He is one of 116 young faculty members who received the award in 2004 for "[showing] the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge."

Other fields include chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics and neuroscience.

Maksimovic works at Fermilab's Tevatron, located in Batavia, Illinois, which is currently the highest-energy accelerator in the world. "Most of my research involves the interactions of the quarks, which are the building blocks of matter," he said.

He explained that there are different types of quarks, and some are heavier and less stable than others which then decay in stable quarks.

"The decays of the heavier quarks are governed by the so-called 'weak interaction,' which is one of the four fundamental forces in nature," Maksimovic said, "together with the electromagnetic force, strong force and gravity. The first three are combined in the so-called Standard Model of particle interactions."

The Standard Model has been in perfect agreement with the data in the past 25 years; however, it does not include gravity.

"It is an 'effective' theory," Maksimovic said, "beautiful in its own way. But there are many questions left unanswered."

When asked if this was similar to the Grand Unified Theory that scientists seek, he said that it was related. "It's annoying," he said.

"It's like Nature is teasing us. [The theory] works well, but it is not satisfying."

Once the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is completed in 2007, Maksimovic will gradually switch to the Compact Muon Sollenoid experiment and work on data collection. The new collider will be the largest particle physics lab in the world and will operate at a much higher energy level than the Tevatron.

"[It] may be able to directly produce many of the particles predicted by various models of the physics beyond the Standard Model," he said.

"I plan to spend most of the Sloan Fellowship on supporting the undergraduate students working for [me] over the summer, and on computers needed for data analysis," Maksimovic said.

"I currently work with four Hopkins physics majors -- three juniors and one senior."

"It's great, because this is something that very few people in high-energy physics [receive]," said Maksimovic.

"People in the past [have been] either very prominent or have [gone onto to earn] Nobel prizes. The impact of the fellowship is much greater in terms of prestige than funding. It really means a lot to me."

Maksimovic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1968, and attended the

University of Belgrade from 1988 to 1992.

In 1991, he was a student at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), where he received his first contact with real particle physics research. He came to the U.S. in 1992 to begin a Ph.D. program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He went to Fermilab in 1993 and defended his thesis in 1997. From 1997 to 2001 he was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. Maksimovic has been an assistant professor at Hopkins since 2001.