Howard Wieman

Howard Henry Wieman is an experimental nuclear physicist specializing in instrumentation and detectors for high-energy nuclear physics.

Wieman is best known for leading the team that designed the STAR Time Projection Chamber (TPC) which was used to discover a new state of matter, the strongly interacting Quark-gluon plasma. The discovery was made at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The STAR TPC was built in Berkeley, installed at RHIC, and tested throughout 1998 and 1999. The first Gold-Gold collisions at RHIC were recorded by STAR with the TPC on June 12, 2000. Seven months later, in January 2001, the STAR collaboration published a measurement of elliptic flow in ultra-relativistic Gold-Gold collisions which indicated that the collision zone at RHIC energies is behaving hydrodynamically and with significant thermalization. This was a key step in making the discovery of a strongly interacting Quark Gluon Plasma and a perfect liquid which was announced simultaneously in 2005 by STAR , BRAHMS, PHOBOS, , and PHENIX.

The STAR experiment took its last event on February 6, 2026 making it one of the longest duration collider accelerator experiments ever undertaken.

Education and career

Wieman received his bachelor's degree from Oregon State University in 1966 and his doctorate in 1975 from the University of Washington. His doctoral advisor was Isaac Halpern. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Colorado and then spent the bulk of his career as a Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At times, he also worked for and in collaboration with the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI, Darmstadt). He retired from LBNL in 2011 but remains active in research.

At LBNL he was responsible for the design and installation of the Low Energy Beam Line at the Bevalac heavy ion accelerator and for the development of two generations of large Time Projection Chambers (TPCs). His first TPC was the EOS Time Projection Chamber at the Bevalac, which he co-led with Hans-Georg Ritter. Wieman then led the design and construction of a larger TPC for the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He finished his career working with thin, high resolution, active pixel sensors. In particular, the Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT) pixel detector for the STAR experiment was a ground-breaking device It became operational in 2014 and was used to observe D mesons produced in heavy ion collisions.

Wieman is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, was awarded the LBNL J.M. Nitschke Technical Excellence Award in 1999, and received the APS Tom W. Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics in 2015.