José W. F. Valle
José W. F. Valle (born June 2, 1953) is a Brazilian-Spanish physicist and a Full Professor at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research CSIC. He is known for his numerous contributions to theoretical astroparticle and high energy physics, especially neutrino physics.
Valle received his PhD at Syracuse University, New York, in 1982. He worked as a Research Associate at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire, UK and as a visiting Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. In 1987 he joined the University of Valencia where he is leading the Astroparticle and High Energy (AHEP) Group of IFIC (Instituto de Física Corpuscular) .[1]
Valle has contributed significantly to the modern theory of neutrino mass. In a groundbreaking work with Joseph Schechter [2] he has provided the first exhaustive discussion of the various mechanisms of neutrino mass generation (including the variants of the seesaw mechanism). The same authors also formulated the Schechter-Valle theorem [3] demonstrating that an observation of neutrinoless double beta decay will necessarily imply neutrinos to be Majorana fermions and vice versa. He also contributed to the correct interpretation of the oscillations of solar and atmospheric neutrinos[4] which led to the physics Nobel Prize 2015 awarded to Arthur B. McDonald and Takaaki Kajita. The discovery of neutrino masses and oscillations can be considered as the only firm indication of the incompleteness of the Standard Model of particle physics with important consequences also for astrophysics and cosmology.
Honors
- Spanish Iberdrola Science & Technology Prize for Theoretical Physics in 1999
- Humboldt Prize in 2002
- Medal of the Mexican Physical Society.[5]
Press
- CERN Courier note on the occasion of the Humboldt Research Award, April-2003
- An Interview to Spanish newspaper [El Pais, October 2006.
- Neutrino detection in Spanish newspaper El Publico, May 2008, download here.
Publications
Authored a particle physics textbook Neutrinos in High Energy and Astroparticle Physics which has been reviewed at the CERN Courier
Here is his publication profile from the INSPIRE-HEP High Energy Physics database.
References
- ^ "INSPIRE".
- ^ Schechter, J.; J. W. F. Valle (1980-06-30). "Neutrino masses in SU(2) ⊗ U(1) theories". Physical Review D. 22 (9): 2227. Bibcode:1980PhRvD..22.2227S. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.22.2227.
- ^ Schechter, J.; J. W. F. Valle (1981-12-14). "Neutrinoless double beta decay in SU(2) ⊗ U(1) theories". Physical Review D. 25 (11): 2951. Bibcode:1982PhRvD..25.2951S. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.25.2951.
- ^ Maltoni, M. (2004). "Status of global fits to neutrino oscillations". New Journal of Physics. 6: 122. arXiv:hep-ph/0405172. Bibcode:2004NJPh....6..122M. doi:10.1088/1367-2630/6/1/122.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|displayauthors=ignored (|display-authors=suggested) (help) - ^ "Universitat de Valencia News".
External links
- Citation summary profile from Inspire Energy Physics database
- Google scholar profile
- Particle theorists citation ranking from Spires HEP database (2004).
- AHEP Group official site
- IFIC AHEP popular site
- IFIC-Institut de Física Corpuscular official site
- Festivalle2013
- [1][2][3][4][5] Items by or about José Valle in the Library of Congress catalogue
- [6][7] Items by or about José Valle in the German National Library catalogue
- Cited in the popular science book The Perfect Wave: With Neutrinos at the Boundary of Space and Time, by Heinrich Päs, Harvard University Press