Premio nobel fisica 2011 saul perlmutter biography

Reinhard Genzel

Physics, 2020
Reinhard Genzel won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy: a black hole 4 million times the mass of our sun.
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Eric Betzig

Chemistry, 2014
Eric Betzig won the 2014 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, which allows scientists to look inside cells and visualize the pathways of individual molecules, including those involved in disease. 

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Saul Perlmutter

Physics, 2011
Saul Perlmutter, who led one of two teams that simultaneously discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe, has been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, to be shared with two members of the rival team. Perlmutter, 52, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), led the Supernova Cosmology Project that, in 1998, discovered that galaxies are receding from one another faster now than they were billions of years ago. He will share the prize with Adam G. Riess, 41, of The Johns Hopkins University and Brian Schmidt, 44, of Australian National University’s Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories, two members of the competing High-Z Supernova Search team. When the discovery was made, Riess was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley working with astronomer Alex Filippenko, who at different times was a member of both teams. Read more

Read more about Saul Perlmutter in the UC Berkeley News

George Smoot

Physics, 2006
Astrophysicist George Smoot headed a team that was able to image the infant universe, revealing its newborn form and the patterns which have shaped the universe ever since. Smoot's work helped to change the nature of the quest to understand the origin and evolution of the universe. Historically, cosmology had been essentially a theoretical field. Smoot was one of the first pioneering astrophysicis

5 October 2011

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess for their discovery of the acceleration of the Universe, one of the more surprising cosmological results in modern astronomy. The discovery was enabled in large part through use of National Science Foundation (NSF) facilities operated by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) with headquarters in Tucson, Arizona and telescopes in Arizona and Chile.

Two independent groups used Type-Ia supernovae (SNe) to map out the Universe. The High-z Supernova Search (High-z SN) team was founded by Brian Schmidt of Australian National University and Nicholas Suntzeff of NOAO’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), while the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) was led by Saul Perlmutter of the University of California at Berkeley.

Both teams used the NOAO Blanco 4-meter telescope at CTIO. The Big Through Put Camera (an optical imager based on technology much like modern digital cameras) was key to the success of the project when coupled with the wide field of view Blanco telescope. CTIO staff, both scientific and technical, were crucial in providing the support that allowed these very difficult observations to be made successfully.

Type Ia SNe are exceptionally bright and so can be seen at great distances. If they were all of the same intrinsic brightness, then their distance could be judged by how faint they appeared. At the time when the two groups were developing their programs, new observations had shown that Type Ia SNe were not all identical. Fortunately, the Calan/Tololo SN survey, led by Mario Hamuy, Mark Phillips, Nicholas Suntzeff (all CTIO astronomers at the time), and Jose Maza (Universidad de Chile), had found many nearby Type Ia SNe using telescopes at CTIO. Analysis of this well-calibrated SNe sample showed that the brightne

Saul Perlmutter is a Nobel Laureate, sharing the 2011 Physics prize for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project and founding director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. His interest in scientific-style critical thinking led to the development of the interdisciplinary undergraduate courses “Physics & Music” and “Sense and Sensibility and Science,” which he has been teaching with his faculty colleagues for more than a decade -- and which is the origin of the new co-authored book, "Third Millennium Thinking.” An author of hundreds of articles on cosmology, Professor Perlmutter has also written popular articles and appeared in numerous PBS, Discovery Channel, and BBC documentaries. In addition to other awards and honorary doctorates, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

American astrophysicist and Nobel laureate (born 1959)

Saul Perlmutter (born September 22, 1959) is a U.S. astrophysicist, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and head of the International Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perlmutter shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

Education

Saul Perlmutter was born one of three children in the Ashkenazi Jewish family of Daniel D. Perlmutter, professor emeritus of chemical and biomolecular engineering at University of Pennsylvania, and Felice (Feige) D. Perlmutter (née Davidson), professor emerita of Temple University’s School of Social Administration. His maternal grandfather, the Yiddish teacher Samuel Davidson (1903–1989), emigrated to Canada (and then with his wife Chaika Newman to New York) from the Bessarabian town of Floreşti in 1919.

Perlmutter spent his childhood in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. He went to school in nearby Germantown; first Greene Street Friends School for the elementary grades, followed by Germantown Friends School for grades 7 through 12. He graduated with an AB in physics from Harvardmagna cum laude in 1981 and received his PhD in physics from Berkeley in 1986. Perlmutter's PhD thesis, titled