Wick Haxton

Wick C. Haxton (born August 21, 1949, in Santa Cruz, California) is an American theoretical nuclear physicist and astrophysicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was appointed a co-editor of the journal Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science as of 2023. In 2024, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Education Haxton grew up in Santa Cruz, studied from 1967 at the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA in physics and mathematics 1971) and received his doctorate in 1976 at Stanford University for his work on Semileptonic Weak Interactions in Complex Nuclei (1975).

Research Haxton is engaged in nuclear astrophysics (supernovae, the solar neutrino problem, nucleosynthesis), neutrino physics (neutrino oscillations, neutrinoless double beta decay, neutrino properties), many-body theory (effective theories) in nuclear physics (as well as in atomic physics and condensed matter physics), and tests of symmetries of fundamental interactions (parity, CP-symmetry, lepton number). He led the early efforts to convert the Homestake Mine in South Dakota to scientific use as the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, but left the project after the mine was flooded in 2003.

Haxton has been a consultant for Los Alamos National Laboratory,

Awards and honors He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1987), and in the 1990s served as chair of the Division of Nuclear Physics and the Division of Astrophysics. the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1988),

He was a Guggenheim Fellow (2000–2001), Visiting Miller Professor at Berkeley (2001), Bethe Lecturer at Cornell University (2001) and received the 2004 Hans Bethe Prize of the American Physical Society for his contributions and scientific leadership in neutrino astrophysics and especially for the connection of nuclear physics theory with experiments and observations in nuclear astrophysics and astrophysics (eulogy).

He is a member of the American Philosophical Society (2024).