Fermilab scientist Tammy Walton, a research associate on the Muon g-2 experiment, has been named the second recipient of the Leona Woods Distinguished Postdoctoral Lectureship Award, which is given by the Physics Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The new experiment is conducting precision measurements to follow up on results reported in the early 2000s by Brookhaven’s version of the experiment. Those measurements indicated that muons, heavy cousins of electrons, were interacting with a powerful magnetic field in a subtly different way than expected, potentially pointing to new physics inexplicable by today’s reigning theory of particle physics.
As recipient of the Leona Woods Lectureship Award, Walton will receive a prize of $1,000 and the opportunity to give a general-interest colloquium and a technical talk about her work — both open to the public — during a weeklong stay at Brookhaven. She will also participate in informal discussions with Brookhaven physicists, including some who worked on the earlier version of the Muon g-2 experiment and theorists who are continually improving the precision of their predictions for the property under question: the muon’s so-called anomalous magnetic moment, which could reveal physics beyond the Standard Model.
Brookhaven’s Physics Department established the Leona Woods Distinguished Postdoctoral Lectureship Award to celebrate the scientific accomplishments of outstanding female physicists and physicists from underrepresented minority groups. It is named for Leona Woods, one of a small number of female physicists who contributed to the Manhattan Project, who later served as a visiting physicist at Brookhaven Lab from 1958 to 1962. During her time at Brookhaven, Woods helped design a muon beam at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron.
Read more about Walton, the Muon g-2 experiment, and the award at Brookhaven National Laboratory‘s news site.