Ben Owen Wins Caltech Award

Benjamin J. Owen (’93) received the Clauser prize for Caltech’s best doctoral dissertation in 1998. He helped find a compelling solution to the problem of why even young neutron stars have relatively slow spins. When the core of a massive star implodes in a supernova explosion, it sometimes becomes a pulsar. Conservation of angular momentum should make it spin in milliseconds, but the youngest pulsars observed take much longer.

Just five years after receiving his B.S. in physics at SSU, the 24-year-old Owen showed that the angular momentum is most likely lost to gravitational waves, due to fluid circulation in the neutron stars.

The work, done in the research group of famed professor Kip Thorne, was part of an effort to predict what might be detected once the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) goes on the air.

Asked about his success at Caltech, Ben replied,

“SSU was a great experience for me because it gave me a solid grounding in the basics while showing me pointers to more involved things (like relativity). I could always go at my own pace--which varied a lot. One of the more subtle benefits of having professors who spent a lot of time deriving the main results is that I got in the habit of deriving them too rather than taking them for granted. That meant that I knew what assumptions made them work and I got an idea how to redo things when the assumptions no longer worked. That’s how you make discoveries in science, on the theory side, anyway.”

While at SSU, Ben published research with Drs. Gordon Spear and Lynn Cominsky. He added,

“I gained a lot by getting an early taste of what research is like. I was also helped tremendously by having a high teacher-student ratio, and above all by having teachers who put a lot of effort into helping me in and out of class.”

Dr. Owen is now a researcher at the Albert Einstein Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany.