Muzaffer Atac

On September 3, 1968, Atac began working for the United States Department of Energy's National Accelerator Laboratory, which would later become Fermilab. Atac moved to Wheaton, Illinois, in January 1971, where he would remain for the rest of his life.^[1]

While at Fermilab, Atac performed groundbreaking work with gas calorimeters, wire drift chambers, and high sensitivity solid state photon detectors, and he received several patents for his work.^[1] He later became interested in applications of particle detectors in the medical field^[2] and did work in medical imaging and the early detection of breast cancer. His work in this area produced several patented biomedical imaging devices. Atac served as head of Fermilab’s detector development group from 1972 until 1978, when he joined the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment. He was one of the first three scientists involved in this experiment, and he remained with CDF until 1997.^[1] Beginning in 1988, he worked on the development of solid state photomultipliers and visible light photon counters with Rockwell International. In 1989, he became an adjunct professor of physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and he became an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Dallas in 1990. He began working on cancer research at the University of California, Irvine in 1996. Beginning in 1995, Atac worked on developing a Silicon Pixels Vertex Tracking System for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.^[1] Atac was author or co-author on over 500 publications.^[3]

Atac retired from Fermilab in June 2008 and died in his home on December 7, 2010.^[2]

• Finding Aid to the Muzaffer Atac Papers at Fermilab
• Muzaffer Atac on INSPIRE-HEP