William Marciano

William Joseph Marciano (born October 11, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in elementary particle physics.

Education and career Marciano graduated with a B.S. and an M.S. in physics at New York University. There he received in 1974 his doctorate with Alberto Sirlin as doctoral advisor. Marciano worked from 1974 to 1980 at Rockefeller University, where he started as a research associate and was then promoted to assistant professor. From 1980 to 1981 he was an associate professor at Northwestern University.

The research of Marciano and Sirlin was important for experiments at BNL for the precise determination of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon and the precise calculation of the masses of the W and Z bosons involved in electroweak interactions; such calculations are important for estimating the mass of the Higgs boson. In neutrino physics, Marciano and his collaborators proposed novel neutrino experiments with very long transmission distances around 2500 km from the neutrino generation in accelerators to neutrino detectors in mines.

Marciano became in 1986 a fellow of the American Physical Society and received in 2001 an Alexander von Humboldt Award. In 2002 he received, jointly with Alberto Sirlin, the Sakurai Prize for "their pioneering work on radiative corrections, which made precision electroweak studies a powerful method of probing the Standard Model and searching for new physics."

Selected publications (over 1050 citations)