Professionalstatus:Distinguished Professor

Affiliation:Department of Physics & Astronomy, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3800, U.S.A.

James Lattimer is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, State University of New York at Stony Brook. Prof. Lattimer received his B. Sc. in Physics from University of Notre Dame in 1972 and Ph. D. in Physics in 1976 from the University of Texas at Austin. He worked as a Research Associate at Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and took a faculty position of an Associate Professor at Stony Brook Univ. in 1983. He was promoted to a full Professor in 1988, and is currently a Distinguished Professor, Physics & Astronomy Dept., Stony Brook Univ. since 2013. Prof. Lattimer was awarded Hans A. Bethe Prize (American Physical Society) 2015 and Fellow (American Physical Society) 2001.

Prof. Lattimer first proposed r-process nucleosynthesis from decompressing neutron star (NS) matter from mergers of compact objects, apparently confirmed by optical observations of GW170817. He developed a liquid droplet equation of state for nuclei in hot, dense matter and published the first publicly available EOS code for numerical simulations of supernovae and mergers. He showed that high symmetry energies would lead to neutrino emission via the direct URCA process and rapid cooling of young NS, and succeeded in measuring the parallax and radius of the closest known NS, RXJ 1856-3734. He explained that the current rapid cooling of the Cas A NS is due to neutron superfluidity in its core, the first demonstration of its existence.