Allen Caldwell

Allen Caldwell is one of currently seven directors of the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He became director in 2002.

Early life and education

Allen Caldwell was born in Verdun, France in 1959 and has dual US and French citizenship. He studied physics first at Rice University in Texas, later at the University of Wisconsin, where he also received his doctorate.

Career

He spent the following 15 years at Columbia University primarily pursuing research into proton structure and related topics. In 2002 he joined the Max Planck Institute for Physics as a director. Since 2004 he has been involved in the search for neutrino less double beta decay. His current accelerator research activities focus on plasma Wakefield acceleration. AWAKE, a demonstration experiment, is under preparation in CERN. Caldwell also takes a keen interested in probability, statistics and data analysis techniques and teaches these subjects at TUM. He has been managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics since April 2012.
In his work, Caldwell is primarily concerned with the development of new particle accelerator technologies based on and with the investigation of quarks and gluons and their interactions. In addition, there is research into the fundamental properties of neutrinos and the search for new dark matter candidates – the axions. He is also particularly interested in probability calculations and statistical methods: he gives lectures on data analysis techniques and Monte Carlo methods at the Technical University of Munich.

Research priorities

Caldwell is concerned with the study of the fundamental building blocks of matter, their properties and their interactions.
He is involved in the following research projects:

The AWAKE experiment - acceleration with plasma waves
MADMAX: Search for axions as dark matter
LEGEND: the nature of the neutrino
The Belle II Experiment

Offices

Representative of the Max Planck Society in the Committee for Particle Physics
International Review Committee, Canadian Institute of Particle Physics
Advisory member, DIS and Related Topics
Scientific Advisory Board, Annals of Physics
Member of the Perspectives Commission of the CPT Section of the Max Planck Society

Functions

Spokesperson, AWAKE Collaboration
Director, Max Planck Institute for Physics
Professor, Columbia University, New York
Director, Nevis Laboratories
Spokesperson, ZEUS Collaboration

Awards

Distinguished Alumnus Award, U. Wisconsin
Fellow of the American Physical Society
Alexander von Humboldt Fellow

Publications

Acceleration of electrons in the plasma wakefield of a proton bunch; AWAKE Collaboration. Aug 29, 2018. 5 pp. Published in Nature 561 no.7723, 363-367
Is the bump significant? An axion-search example; Frederik Beaujean, Allen Caldwell, Olaf Reimann. Oct 18, 2017. 18 pp. Published in Eur.Phys.J. C78 no.9, 793
Global Bayesian analysis of neutrino mass data; Allen Caldwell, Alexander Merle, Oliver Schulz, Maximilian Totzauer. May 4, 2017. 15 pp.; Published in Phys.Rev. D96 no.7, 073001
Dielectric Haloscopes: A New Way to Detect Axion Dark Matter; MADMAX Working Group. Nov 17, 2016. 6 pp.; Published in Phys.Rev.Lett. 118 no.9, 091801