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Sheldon Datz Prize
The Sheldon Datz Prize supports an outstanding young researcher to attend ICPEAC.
Sheldon Datz was a pioneer in the field of atomic and molecular collision physics and a staunch supporter of ICPEAC. "Throughout his remarkable career, he planted seeds in different places and recruited collaborators to help the seeds grow and bear fruit, opening up several new fields in atomic physics1".
His many major achievements include
- Pioneering reactive scattering experiments using crossed molecular beams
- First experimental evidence for channelling in solids
- Discovery of the first unambiguous evidence for resonant coherent excitation
- The first dielectronic recombination experiments
- First ultrarelativistic atomic collision experiments at CERN.
His work was acknowledged by the American Physical Society with the award of the Davisson-Germer Prize in 1998 and by the US Department of Energy with the Enrico Fermi prize in 2000.
As a life-long supporter of ICPEAC, he was International Chair of the meeting in Aarhus, Denmark in 1993 and uniquely Local Chair of two meetings, Gatlinburg, TN in 1981 and Santa Fe, NM in 2001.
Following his untimely death in August 2001, just after the ICPEAC meeting in Santa Fe, a fund was set up in his memory with donations from his many friends and colleagues within the ICPEAC community to support the Sheldon Datz Prize
The award of the Sheldon Datz Prize supports the attendance of an outstanding young scientist (graduate student, post-doc). Among equally qualified candidates, the personal/institutional funding situation that would otherwise not enable participation of the applicant at ICPEAC is taken into account.
The first Sheldon Datz Prize was awarded at the Rosario meeting in 2005 to Michael Bromley of Darwin University, Northern Territory, Australia and the second, at the Freiburg meeting in 2007 to Vandama Sharma from a unit of Department of Space, Navrangpura, Ahmedabad, India. During the Kalamazoo meeting, in 2009, the Sheldon Datz Prize has been awarded to Juan Martin Randazzo, from the Centro Atomico de Bariloche (Argentina), for his work on “Solutions to the three-body collisions breakup: a Sturmians approach”.