Ricardo Alarcon

Biography

Ricardo Alarcon did his undergraduate studies at the University of Chile and received his Ph.D. in 1985 from Ohio University. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 1989, when he joined Arizona State University as an Assistant Professor. His research covers experiments in electromagnetic nuclear physics and in fundamental neutron science. He has held visiting professor appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1995-1997 and 1999-2001 and served as project manager and scientific spokesperson for the Bates Large Acceptance Spectrometer project at MIT-Bates from 1999 to 2002. He was a member of the Department of Energy/National Science Foundation Nuclear Science Advisory Committee from 2001 to 2005. In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2005-2007 he served on the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council (NRC) Rare Isotope Science Assessment Committee (RISAC) whose report paved the way for the Facility of Rare Isotopes Beams (FRIB). In 2007-2009 he served on the NRC Scientific Assessment of Free Electron Laser (FEL) Technology for Naval Applications Committee, and presently on the NRC Committee on Assessment and Outlook for Nuclear Physics, a decadal study of nuclear physics (NP2010). Since 2007 he has chaired the organizing committee of the VII, VIII, and IX Latin American Symposium on Nuclear Physics and its Applications.

Research Interest

Professor Alarcon’s research interests are the design, construction, and execution of experiments in basic nuclear science. He has carried out experiments designed to study the spin dependent electromagnetic response of few-body nuclei at the NIKHEFfacility in the Netherlands and at the MIT-Bates Linear Accelerator Center. His present research activities are centered on experiments addressing fundamental issues of nuclear physics: the measurement of the parity-violating asymmetry in the capture of polarized neutrons by protons to determine the strength of the hadronic weak interaction; a precision measurement of the radiative decay of the neutron with the goal of improving the precision of quantities associated with the neutron decay; the measurement of electron and positron elastic scattering from hydrogen to determine the contribution of multiple-photon exchange in elastic lepton-nucleon scattering and address the present puzzle of the proton form factor ratio; and a search for the neutron electric dipole moment which possible existence is of fundamental interest and would significantly challenge the theoretical extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. The experiments are taking place at the Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL, at the NIST facility, and at the DESY facility in Germany. He is also involved in the design and construction of a new kind of spectrometer for more precise measurements of neutron decay parameters to test the Standard Model.