Simon Mochrie (Professor of Physics & Applied Physics) has won the 2009 Advanced Photon Source Arthur H. Compton Award. He was presented his award at a ceremony on May 4, 2009.
He was recognized along with Gerhard Grübel (DESY) and Mark Sutton (McGill University) for
Pioneering efforts in x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS), which exploits the coherent properties of synchrotron x-rays to study the slow dynamics of condensed matter at short length scales
The Arthur H. Compton award was established in 1995 by the APS Users Organization (APSUO) to recognize an important scientific or technical accomplishment at the Advanced Photon Source. The awards are generally made biennially at APS User Meetings, which are held every spring. A call for nominations is sent out before the meeting, and the winner(s) is invited to give an award lecture at the meeting. Awards are not necessarily made each year.
Compton was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927 for discovering and explaining changes in x-ray wavelengths resulting from x-ray collisions with electrons, the so-called Compton effect. This important discovery in 1922 confirmed the dual nature (wave and particle) of electromagnetic radiation. A Ph.D. from Princeton University, Compton held many prominent positions, including professor of physics at The University of Chicago and chairman of the committee of the National Academy of Sciences that studied the military potential of atomic energy. His position on that committee made Compton instrumental in initiating the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb.