Dr. Hugh E. Montgomery
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Newport News, Virginia 23606 USA
Curator and author
Current Position
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Director
Curiculum Vitae
Born 21st March 1948 in Middleham, Yorkshire, England
- Civil Status: Married
- Wife: Barbara Jean Montgomery
- Children: Brian E. Montgomery (1974) and Richard Montgomery (1977)
- Citizenship: United Kingdom
- US Status: Resident Alien
1959-1966 Secondary Education: Yorebridge Grammar School, Askrigg, Leyburn, Yorkshire, England.
1966-1972 Dept. of Physics, Faculty of Science, Manchester University, England
1969 B.Sc. Hons 1st class
1970 Diploma in Advanced Studies in Science (distinction)
1972 Ph.D Thesis title: Virtual photo-production of piminus Delta(++) off protons." Supervisor: Dr. B. Dickinson
1972-1978 SRC Research Associate Daresbury Nuclear Physics Laboratory Rutherford High Energy Laboratory.
1969-1972 Mancaster electroproduction collaboration
1972-1974 PEP (pion electro-production) collaboration (DNPL-Frascati – Pisa)
1975-1977 CHM(CERN – Holland – Manchester) CERN ISR exp.R207
1978-1983 Staff Member, CERN.
1973-1983 European Muon Collaboration (EMC)
1982-1983 Coordinator of EMC (Spokesman and Contact for CERN- NA2, NA9, NA28.
1983-1985 Associate Scientist, Fermilab.
1985-1987 Scientist I, Fermilab.
1987-1995 Scientist II, Fermilab
1995-2008 Scientist III, Fermilab
1984 Assoc. Head, Research Services Dept., Fermilab.
1984-1987 Head, Computing Dept., Fermilab
1989-1991 Deputy Head of Research Division, Fermilab
1983-1992 E665 Collaboration, Fermilab
1987-1989 Spokesman, Experiment E665, Fermilab.
1990-Pres Member of D0 Collaboration
1990-1993 Co-Leader, D0 Upgrade Project
1993-1999 Co-Spokesman, D0 Experiment.
1999-2001 Assoc. Project Manager for D0 Upgrade Project
1999-2002 Head, PPD/D0 Experiment Department(Project Dept.)
2002-2008 Fermilab Associate Director for Research
2008 Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Director Jefferson Science Associates, President
Hugh Montgomery: Research Interests
- General Comments
My research interests have developed over the thirty years in the field along three broad lines. Two of those lines are dominated by the physics thrust, a third is dominated by the physical and sociological scale of the experiments with which I have been involved.
- Lepton Scattering
I entered the field one year after the first glimpses of deep inelastic lepton scattering were reported by groups from DESY and SLAC at the Vienna Conference in 1968.
I joined a lepton scattering experiment at Daresbury Nuclear Physics Laboratory operating a 5 GeV electron synchrotron in 1969. I worked on two experimental series which studied form factors and the structures in the resonance region, electroproduction at threshold as a way to access the axial vector form factor of the nucleon, and studies which tickled the kinematic region beyond momentum transfers of 1 GeV squared and hadronic energies of 2 GeV; these became became accepted as the boundary of the deep inealastic region.
Already in 1972, I became involved in the design of a muon scattering experiment for the CERN SPS, which emerged as the European Muon Collaboration. Having been responsible for one of its detectors and being one of the primary people involved in the mounting of the experiment, I became spokesman in 1981. In 1982, on my watch, we had the breakthrough of finding significant differences between the structure functions as measured with iron and as measured with deuterium. This became known as the EMC effect.
During this period, I was active in planning the future. I worked a little on the machine backgrounds for the HERA design and also the planning for an extension of the muon scattering program at the Fermilab Tevatron. The latter emerged as E665 of which I was spokesman in the period 1987-89 during which its first operation took place. With the energy at the Tevatron, but not the luminosity, we were able to measure structure functions down to fairly low x-Bjorken and to build a bridge from the measurements at CERN to those at HERA.
This series of experiments brought us from a relative ignorance of the structure of the nucleon through the “naivety” of the quark parton model, in which even experimentalists could make the calculations, to the sophistication of the many layers of quantum chromodynamics. We measured the strong coupling constant and saw the jet like structures in the final state corresponding to both the gluon emission and the photon-gluon fusion graphs. The technique, using a well understood electromagnetic probe to investigate a rich hadron structure, was incisive. It’s also a technique which is easy to explain to a lay-person.
Currently, as Director at Jefferson Laboratory, I am picking up some of the threads of this phase of my career, which persisted for more than twenty years. We are seeing even more layers of the target peeled away as we use the enhanced techniques of spin and high luminosity.
- Hadron Collider Physics
I have been lucky enough to work on two of the hadron colliders which have operated for particle and nuclear physics. At CERN I spent a couple of years working on the CERN Intersecting Storage Rings. This collider was remarkable in many respects. It was a continuous beam (DC) machine, no time structure that I ever saw. So, with no interbunch spaces and no spills structure the time to read out an event was paid for directly. On the other hand using an oscilloscope was straightforward, much different than on the Tevatron Fixed Target machine in which there was (at the time) a pause or cigarette break as the superconducting machine ramped during a minute or so to full energy.
At the ISR we were all fired up to do diffractive scattering. Using detection of two scattered protons in the final state, I was able to look at double reggeon exchange and by identifying that component which was due to the pomeron, to measure the pomeron-pomeron total cross section. We were relatively ill-prepared for the advent of parton-parton scattering which was a corollary of the lepton scattering work, and along with many others, our searches for charm post-dated the observation of the J/Psi particle.
However, once you have worked with the highest energies available, the desire sticks. I returned to the energy frontier when I joined the DZero Experiment at the Tevatron Collider. At this proton-antiproton machine, we were able to do many things. In its own place on the list was observation of the top quark I had the privilege of being co-spokesman of the experiment when the search reached a climax. Helping to bring that paper to submission was a high point of my career.
The highest energies are often touted as important for the searches for new phenomena, and in many ways, that is the raison d’etre. But I have learned to expect more. We transformed hadron-hadron scattering from colliding buckets on buckets to sophisticated work. Measurements of the masses of the top quark demand precise calorimetry and reconstruction of complex final states. Constraint fitting of topologies, thought to be lost with the demise of the bubble chamber, were reborn. The measurements of the mass of the W boson, in which I remain involved through an editorial board for the analysis will be in the text books for years to come. A lot of the work comes as a result of the design of the second phase of the DZero experiment, the Upgrade and Run II (2001-????) in the design of which I was deeply involved.
By my work on a couple of committees and my management roles, I have been quite close to the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which is undergoing a difficult start-up. I would like to imagine, at some point attempting to contribute to one of the actual experiments in operation.
- Large Scale Experiments
From the early ‘70s when the experiments on the electron scattering experiments contained 12 to 15 participants, and those at the ISR say 20-25, we went through a phase change so that when we started the EMC experiment, we were about 70 PhDs and that grew to 140 by the time I was spokesman of the collaboration.
For many, this was a difficult process and there are those who still apologize for it. My experience was one of joy of participation in a large focused enterprise. To be at the center, in the engine room, close to the decisions, making the decisions, getting 400 physicists to sign a paper, were things which I enjoyed. As a result, I became a strong player in the organization and corporate execution of large experiments. I believe that it is a piece of our scientific endeavor which I understand. I believe that developing this understanding and the ability to operate in the multi-body interactions of nuclear and particle physics sociology has constituted a significant fraction of my intellectual worth to physics. And I still believe that this framework is conducive to good ideas and exhilarating physics.
- Future
At present, I am fully occupied by my role as Director at Jefferson Laboratory. I am promoting deep inelastic scattering probing, ever more incisively, the structure of matter and hadron spectroscopy, which tests our basic understanding of how quantum chromodynamics works. In addition, we are seeing particularly exciting opportunities to access the electroweak phase transition with parity violating techniques. If one is suffering withdrawal from the energy frontier, this is the fix. If it works, we will be able to play in that storied arena with the best measurements we have ever seen, from LEP, from SLAC, and from the Tevatron.
At some point in the future, I expect to make a choice between something like the Moeller Experiment and a participation in the LHC, but perhaps physics will have changed before I need to make that choice and I’ll choose to go in completely different direction.
- Hugh Montgomery: Teaching
Supervision of Graduate Students
CERN – Holland – Manchester experiment
1975-76 Masters Student from the U. Utrecht
European Muon Collaboration:
1979 – 1982 Wolfgang Stockhausen – University of Wuppertal, Ph. D.
E665 Experiment
1988 – 1992 two Harvard Ph. D. students on E665, one extensively.
Thesis Committees
DZero Experiment
- ~ 1996 – 2000(??) Bob Olivier, Ph. D. U. Paris VI et VII, France
- ~ 2004 Eric Kajfasz, Habilitation CPPM, Marseille, France (Eric is now the Lab Director at CPPM)
- Development and delivery of courses for Academic Training and Summer Schools
Int. School of Elementary Particle Physics, Kupari/Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, 1979.
“The EMC Muon Scattering Experiment” and “Experiments with polarized lepton beam and polarized target”, H.E.Montgomery,
Arctic School of Physics "Gauge Theories of the Eighties", Akaaslompolo, Finland, 1982
“Deep inelastic scattering and Jets”, H.E.Montgomery, CERN-EP/82-164, 1982, Lectures presented at the 1982 Arctic School of Physics "Gauge Theories of the Eighties", Springer-Verlag ed. R. Raitio, J. Lindfors
Fermilab Academic Training Lectures, 1989. Fermilab, 1990.
“Parton Distributions from Deep Inelastic Scattering”, H.E.Montgomery,
Lecture at the International School of Sub-nuclear Physics, Erice, Trapani, Sicily, Italy, 1993
“Some Recent Experimental Results” from Fermilab, ”, H.E.Montgomery,. Fermilab-Conf-94/054.
Lectures at CBPF, LAFEX, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1995
- Collider Physics
Ecole de Gif-sur-Yvette, CPPM Marseille, France, 1998
“The Physics of Jets” and “Tevatron and LHC, Machines and Detectors”
Cargese School, Corsica, France, 1999
“Recent Results and Perspectives at CDF and D0”, H.E.Montgomery, , FNAL-Conf-99/346-E, hep-ex/9912043
The Sixth J.J. Giambiagi Winter School of Physics, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2004.
Particle Physics; Experimental Physics at Fermilab beyond the Tevatron
20/03/2011
