Bio for David Saltzberg

David Saltzberg is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received a bachelor's degree in Physics in 1989 from Princeton University where he worked in the Princeton Cyclotron. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1994, where he measured the mass of the W boson at the Fermilab Tevatron and CDF detector. In 1995-97, he performed post-graduate work at CERN on the CHORUS experiment looking for nu_mu to nu_tau oscillations with a 1-ton photographic emulsion target. Saltzberg returned to the U.S. and CDF as a faculty member at UCLA where he and his group helped build the CDF Run-II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron. His group looks for signs of supersymmetry and measures exotic properties of the top quark. As an assistant professor, Saltzberg received a Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, and Dept. of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator Award. Saltzberg has partially shifted his research towards neutrino astronomy, using radio detection techniques. He is currently working on the ANITA project, which recently completed its first one-month scientific balloon mission looking for the electromagnetic pulses from neutrino interactions in the Antarctic Ice. He and his students spend their free time underground in Gulf-Coast salt mines measuring their suitability as future neutrino telescopes.

David Saltzberg, with help from UCLA graduate students and postdocs, is the science consultant for new the CBS television situation-comedy, The Big Bang Theory, by checking scripts and meeting with the producers, writers, actors, set decorators, prop masters, costume designers etc. to help ensure scientific accuracy. I also write a blog The Big Blog Theory that explains the science behind each episode.

Selected Papers:

• ANITA Collaboration, "Constraints on cosmic neutrino fluxes from the ANITA experiment", Phys. Rev. Lett. 96 171101 (2006).
• P. Gorham, K. Liewer, C. Naudet, D. Saltzberg, and D. Williams, (GLUE Collaboration) "Experimental Limit on the Cosmic Diffuse Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Flux", Phys. Rev. Lett., 93, 041101 (2004).
• CDF Collaboration, "Inclusive Search for Anomalous Production of High-pT Like Sign Lepton Pairs in Proton-Antiproton collisions at 1.8 TeV", Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 061802 (2004).
• CDF Collaboration, "Measurement of the top+antitop Production Cross section in Proton-Antiproton Collisions at 1.96 TeV Using Dilepton Events,'' to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett (2004)
• D. Goldstein and D. Saltzberg, "The RASNIK Real-Time Relative Alignment Monitor for the CDF Inner Tracking Detectors," Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A, 506 92 (2003).
• D. Saltzberg et al., "Monte Carlo Design Studies for a Next Generation UHE Neutrino Observatory in a Large Rock Salt Formation," Proceedings of the Society of Optical Engineering (SPIE), vol. 4858, 191 (2003).
• P. Gorham, D. Saltzberg et al., "Measurements of the Suitability of Large Rock Salt Formations for Radio Detection of High Energy Neutrinos," Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A. 476, 476 (2002).
• D. Saltzberg, P. Gorham, D. Walz, et al., "Observation of the Askaryan Effect: Coherent Microwave Emission from Charge Asymmetry in High Energy Particle Cascades", Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 2802 (2001).
• F. Halzen and D. Saltzberg, "Tau Neutrino Appearance with a 1000 Megaparsec Baseline," Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 4305 (1998).
• Chorus collaboration, "A Search for nu_mu to nu_tau Oscillation," Phys. Lett B424, 202 (1998).
• J. Dupraz, D. Saltzberg, and G. Van Beek, "The Optical Alignment Monitoring System of Chorus (RASNIK)", Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A 388 (1997).
• CDF Collaboration, "Measurement of the W Boson Mass", Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 11 (1995).
• CDF Collaboration, "Observation of Top Quark Production in Proton-Antiproton Collisions," Phys. Rev. Lett. 74 2626 (1995)

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