Scott Crooker and William Daughton named APS Fellows

January 31, 2011—Scott Crooker of the Lab's Condensed Matter and Magnet Science group and William Daughton of the Plasma Theory and Applications group have been named American Physical Society Fellows.

Crooker was recognized for “the development of magneto-optical spectroscopies and their applications to colloidal quantum dots and electron spin transport and noise in semiconductors.” Daughton was cited for his “seminal theoretical and computational contributions to the understanding of magnetic reconnection physics.”

Crooker holds a doctorate in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he used ultrafast lasers to study spin dynamics in diluted magnetic semiconductors. He joined LANL in 1998 as a Director's Postdoctoral Fellow at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory — Pulsed Field Facility and has been on the scientific staff of the NHMFL since 2000. Crooker has received a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellows' Prize for Research and an Outstanding Innovation Technology Transfer Award.

Daughton  received a doctorate in theoretical plasma physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on plasma theory for magnetic fusion devices.  He came to the Laboratory in 1997 as a postdoctoral fellow in Space Science and Applications (ISR-1). As a staff member in the Applied Physics (X) Division, Daughton worked on equation-of-state for dense plasmas, collisionless shocks, laser-plasma interactions, and the basic physics of magnetic reconnection. In 2004, he joined the University of Iowa as a physics professor and received a National Science Foundation Career award to study magnetic reconnection in the Earth’s magnetosphere.  Daughton returned to the Laboratory in 2007, joining XCP-6.

Since its founding in 1899, the American Physical Society has bestowed the honor of Fellow on no more than half of one percent of its members each year.