Flavors
Warren W. Buck wbuck@wu.edu
Editor’s note: This article is an expanded version of a Banquet talk entitled “Flavors” given by that author at the APS NW Sectional meeting held at the University of Calgary June 27. 2025.
Let me start with the fact I was born in 1946 at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington DC originally on the grounds of Camp Baker (a Civil War Union safe haven for the escaped enslaved) and becoming the Howard University campus in 1868 in Washington DC. My father was Phi Betta Kappa and a three year football letterman in college; my mother was in the first round of Head Start teachers; and my brother and I were two of the first Black Eagle Scouts in the National Capital (Washington) Area Boy Scouts of America Council. I lived within the segregated Washington DC Black community until completing my BS degree in Math with physics minor. Key mentors were Dr Walter Talbot and Dr Robert M. Dixon at Morgan State University. Before Morgan, I had attended Lincoln University in Missouri, dropping out after my sophomore year.
The summer before I entered physics grad school in 1968 at The College of William & Mary, I worked for Prof O.M. Phillips in fluid mechanics at Johns Hopkins. There I met Professor Stanley Corrsin who gifted me his second edition copy of Relativity by Albert Einstein. Earning a MS in physics with emphasis in Plasma Physics experimentation (that produced my first APS abstract) was challenging because I also became the founding president of the William & Mary’s Black Students Organization. However not passing my first PhD Qualifying Exam, I dropped out, went back to the DC area, taught math at Bowie State College. After spending one night at anchor on a dear friend’s family cruising sail boat, I set out to learn to sail at the Washington Sailing Marina in Alexandria Virginia. Supported by my entire sailing club, I was the first Black American to race in a regatta at the segregated and very reluctant Tampa Bay Yacht Club.
My love for physics, however, propelled me to contact William & Mary to see if it were possible to return to pursue the PhD. The then chair, Rolf Winter, told me they were hoping I would return and they had kept my full ride fellowship available. Once again it was off to Williamsburg this time taking my 15 ft day sailor/racer with me. I passed the Qualifying Exam and started working with Professor Franz Gross on relativistic nuclear/intermediate energy physics. During that time, I met visiting Professor Chris Fronsdal, of UCLA, who had a formulation of the BetheSalpeter equation different from Franz’s version; AND Chris was an experienced ocean sailor.
In 1974, as I worked to solve the fully relativistic (special theory) Gross equation for the deuteron of which the pion was considered, at that time, to be the mediator of the Nuclear Force between the neutron and proton that were the components of the deuteron, I took a break and met Chris Fronsdal in Nassau Bahamas. He had just closed the Atlantic on his 40 ft sailing trimaran. That was my first time in the gorgeous Bahama archipelago and my first ride on a trimaran. I was excited to take an overnight open water passage from Nassau to the Great Abaco chain of islands, to the north. There, in Little Harbour, I met really good friends, Ron and Jean Chapman, who taught me about boat building and living on a remote tropical island.
I did manage to solve the coupled channel deuteron problem, for my PhD, and showed that the hard core was not hard at all but offered different short range physics; relativistic effects and, later, quark effects. This finding marked a transition of nuclear physics to intermediate nuclear physics, as many of us would call it.
My postdoc was at Stony Brook, in Gerry Brown’s Group. There I researched nucleonantinucleon interactions employing meson theory, that was so successful at describing NN interactions, along with Carl Dover and JeanMarc Richard. That work predicted a plethora of quasi bound states. To also spend time on the nearby Long Island Sound and stretching my resources, I bought a 22 ft sailboat to cruise Long Island Sound. Known for long passages, one year later I received a loan to buy a 31 ft trimaran named Shadowfax, a Jim Brown Searunner built by Chris White; and sailed her with a crew of three from North River (at Jim Brown’s dock) off Chesapeake Bay to western Long Island. I then sailed her solo to Mt Sinai Long Island where she was to be moored. Sailing her to Martha’s Vineyard one summer, meeting famous yacht designers and world sailors, showed how comfortable Shadowfax really was. Also, I learned to paint watercolor under the gentle encouragement of Stony Brook Professor Nandor Balazs. It was at Stony Brook that I began to learn about quark physics from the MIT Bag Model, mentored by William & Mary mentor Professor Carl Carlson. My intermediate w intermediateenergy nuclear was starting to attract high energy/particle physics elements.
Leaving Stony Brook after a 3 year term, I landed a staffresearcher job with the University of Paris’ laboratory in Orsay The long distance from Shadowfax and the dearth of nucleonantinucleon experimental data was disappointing as the huge annihilation cross section washed out any possibility of detecting predicted quasi bound states. I hope perhaps new experimental techniques can still be developed. Yet, in 1980, it gave an opportunity to request and be granted a five month leave, without pay, to rejoin Shadowfax on Long Island and sail her again to Martha’s Vineyard to supply up for a sail to The Bahamas. Five months and quitting my job turned into three years of learning cruising sailing; being partially sustained by selling watercolors to boaters and tourists and by learning to spearfish while free diving. During that time, with help from friends, I developed oil painting techniques while SCUBA diving on the sea floor. And, yes, Shadowfax got caught on a windward shore facing hurricane force winds and being greatly damaged. After two of us repaired her on a Bahamian beach, we sailed her back safely to the USA across 4 days of open water. Whew!
While in the Bahamas, in 1983, I received a letter from Franz Gross, in his wisdom, urging me, in his wisdom, to return to help build a new proposed new electron accelerator for the US Department of Energy in Newport News Virginia only a short drive from William & Mary. Identified, at that time with the cumbersome named, Continuous Electron Accelerator Facility (shortened to CEBAF), after construction completion, became the heart of the Jefferson Lab or JLab. While sailing I had met a lot of folks who had no idea about the beauty of physics or even what it is; and this opportunity to help tell the story of physics while participating in building a new lab was intriguing; so, to the Virginia Peninsula the small crew of Shadowfax steered.
Upon arriving at Chesapeake Bay, I landed a tenureline professor position at Hampton University, a private historically Black university located on the historic Hampton River where Shadowfax could dock. There I could help introduce nuclear and high energy physics to bright students, allowing them to contribute to the rare building of a world class accelerator lab from its naissance. I was the sole nuclear/high energy prof there among the four senior faculty.
Right off the bat, I was fortunate to be awarded a grant from NASA to calculate space radiation effects; focusing on antinuclear cosmic rays. Then it came to mind to create an international summer program to attract attention to Hampton as a member of SURA the Southeast Universities Research Association that managed CEBAF/JLab. This came in the form of HUGS (Hampton University Graduate Studies) at CEBAF which was launched by successfully being awarded $4,000, jointly, from the cities of Newport News and Hampton, to me as PI. I also created all the original art designs for the HUGS Tshirt advertisements for the first 10 years of its running. Neither NSF nor DOE would make an award because there was no “track record.” But after the first year, both agencies reached out to request a proposal. The collective wisdom from my colleagues and allies was to accept the DOE proposal invitation. HUGS has continued under DOE funding since 1986. One of HUGS’ biggest supporters was then CEBAF’s, the Scientific Assistant to the Director, Bev Hartline, who is now Councilor for APS fora FPS and FDI. In those early years, Bev arranged for CEBAF Director to take all the HUGS students out to “Lunch with the Director.” HUGS is now, my understanding, the oldest continually operating summer “school” specifically for nuclear physics graduate students in the World. Since its inception it welcomed all early graduate students; and particularly recruited students from campuses with limited to no nuclear physics research available, providing a path for many more students to enrich their physics preparation.
At that time, Hampton had only an undergrad and small masters program in physics. The expected research to be conducted at JLab was best performed by university and lab researchers with PhD students. This motivation drove me to establish a PhD degree program offering at Hampton; and the Hampton administration agreed. It would be the first PhD that Hampton offered. While working with NASA, I was also fortunate to be awarded an NSF grant to develop a nuclear physics group that, in actuality consisted of me and one postdoc. This NSF grant together with the clear recognition that JLab was real and historically excluded folks could make an impact was compelling. I also led Hampton in the partnering with JLab to create four joint faculty appointments under an MOU signed by JLab director, Hermann Grunder, and Hampton University President, William Harvey. So, I prepared a proposal to NSF for a research center of excellence (unprecedented at a minority serving institution in nuclear and high energy physics). The plan required focused partnering with newly hired faculty under the MOU, JLab staff and others contributing in suggestions and support . The first faculty member hired under the MOU was Keith Baker (presently professor at Yale University) whose PhD work was in low energy nuclear physics and who was considering dropping out of physics when I met him at Duke University.
Hampton obtained full accreditation to offer the PhD degree; and received, with me as PI, a $10 million ($1 million per year) cooperative agreement with NSF to create the Nuclear/High Energy Physics (NuHEP)Research Center of Excellence in 1992, a few years before JLab had its first beam. My faculty colleague on the PhD accreditation pursuit and Department Chair, Demetrius Venable, also won a similar large Center award from NASA. These two awards bolstered our new PhD offering tremendously!
The NuHEP Center, I directed, leveraged the additional joint faculty hiring of Liguang Tang, Cynthia Keppel and Jose Goity. Under NSF rules of the agreement, the Chairperson of the Center was the Hampton University President; also we established an external group named the Planning and Advisory Committee (PAC) of which I asked Jim Gates (University of Maryland) to chair and he agreed. It didn’t hurt that Jerry Friedman (MIT) and other very notables were on the PAC offering strategic advice. My charge to the PAC was, “If we are not performing world class physics, then advise us how to do so. If we are performing world class physics, tell everyone.” The PAC offered no substantive corrections. At steady state, the Center had a membership of about 30 that included faculty, post docs, graduate students, undergraduates and staff. Hampton University renovated a building to house both NuHEP and the NASA laser Center. Then the national average for graduating Black American physics PhDs was 0.5 per year; the department started graduating 23 per year. By 1997, NuHEP hosted nine JLab fully approved experiments, two had already run, along with experiments at NIKHEF (in the Netherlands), Brookhaven National Lab, and MIT/Bates. Also, two NuHEP faculty won Early Career grants (Goity and Keppel) and another (Baker) with a Frontiers Grant. Keeping the Center a Center while, at the same time, encouraging initiative and creativity was my growthmanagement model. My theoretical work was focused on Kaon electromagnetic and electroweak form factors. In addition, I appeared on the Bill Nye The Science Guy show as a “Way Cool Scientist” in the Season 5 “Atoms and Molecules” episode in 1998. that reached many thousands of young people. It was a seriously exciting time!
In reference to starting NuHEP, I feel enormous gratitude for two relationships in particular. The first is with Ben Zeidman (deceased) with whom I shared a library carrel “office” in the very early stages, before HUGS. We engaged in richenthusiastic discussions around Hampton focusing on strangeness thru ee’k experiments. The second is with Roger Carlini, the first Hall C Leader, who committed strongly to support Hampton experimentalists researching in Hall C, through the MOU. Hall C is where the new arena of ee’k experiments were being encouraged. In addition to being encouraged by senior NSF officials, these physics relationships were key in the creation of NuHEP.
But the ceiling started to show. In 1998 I gave an invited talk at a workshop at University of Washington’s Institute for Theoretical Physics (INT) on my work on strangeness.
During that visit, I ran into friends Mark McDermott, former Department Chair at Washington, and his wife Lillian McDermott, the renowned physics education researcher; both now deceased. I had known them for years. They had no idea I was visiting INT and Lillian wanted me to give a second talk on what I called the Hampton Experiment of which NuHEP was a part. I did so; and in the audience was an associate dean in the Graduate Dean’s Office who gave me a tour of the Seattle campus that ended up in the Dean’s office. There were others in the room and the Dean and her husband were sailors; by chance I had sailed that very make of boat they owned and so we rambled on about sailing. Suddenly, she got a very serious face and told me that I was perfect for the job. My reply was “What job?” The next moment, I discovered she was the chair of the search committee for the founding chancellor of the Bothell campus just under construction and she thought I would be the perfect fit. This all caught me without a rudder! Even though it offered a unique opportunity to build a new campus for the University of Washington with an extraordinary physics department near by, I realized Lillian and Mark had set me up. For the next several days, I talked with many about this new campus including the Dean once again.
When I returned to Hampton, I became convinced I would make an official application for the Bothell job; after all, there was the Puget Sound/Salish Sea to explore. NuHEP was running very well with approximately $3.5 million annual budget in the hands of Program Manager Vevelyn Nazario and Thia Keppel (presently Associate Director for Experimental Programs at JLab) agreed to be Interim Director. So, I met with senior NuHEP members to share that I was excited by the unique chance to build a new university to reach more students.
The search process for the UW Bothell chancellor position concluded with me landing the position; and my 15 years at Hampton ended. On July 1, 1999 I became Dean and Chancellor of a campus that occupied a building and a half in a business park; and which had a permanent campus in the early stages of construction. My task was to complete the establishment of the permanent campus, maintain and grow academic programs of the quality expected of UW quality in solely upper division curricula and a couple of master’s degree offerings. As I hired the first Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs on my first day, the title of Dean was eventually dropped. I inherited a Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) consisting of folks giving valuable strategic, non fiduciary, advice. I soon led the group to rename itself the Chancellor’s Advisory Board. We now consider members of the CAC as our Founders.
The permanent campus was sighted on ranch land that was to be converted. Not only did my administration complete the initial construction of the permanent campus in Bothell including a public bus line campus stop; but did so on time and slightly under budget. The campus received award recognition from Washington State for that achievement. A mandated component of the construction was recovering a fresh water wetlands that the ranch land had trampled. Thousands of indigenous trees and plants were planted after removing invasive species; and a portion of the North Creek had been straightened to move timber across the land, to the Sammamish River connected to Lake Washington for commerce. The contractor we hired to perform this wetland recovery found the old creek bed, dug it out, placed new bedrock to accept the flow of water again. I was there the moment the new creek bed began taking the flow of the North Creek water. A fun day!
Later, the creek was certified to be salmonsafe and salmon were seen spawning there once again. That gave warmth to my Eagle Boy Scout values and Buddhist sense of balance and well being.
We were also charged with colocating with the State’s newest community college and writing the initial colocation documents for the community college students and faculty to use the University of Washington Library, to receive maintenance and security benefits from University of Washington Bothell and so forth. With respect to security, we partnered with the Bothell City Police so that our security team would not carry weapons as we requested.
To develop close relations with the local community (City of Bothell and Snohomish County), local and State elected officials, and friends of the campus, I served on several Chamber of Commerce boards, gave talks at Rotary Club meetings, served on the board of United Way of Seattle and led the Children’s Initiative of the Snohomish United Way and other organizations.
The rationale of the colocation was the community college would effectively serve as the lower division component of the campus’ while UW Bothell would be the upper division. There would be community college students transferring to UW Bothell etc. Yet, that expectation was not working well as the predominant group of transfer students came from other community colleges. That circumstance and the results of a Needs Assessment gave us reason to seek State authority for full 4 year status. We were not alone. UW Tacoma, the other new campus of the University of Washington and the three similar campus of Washington State University were also seeking 4 year status. Not only that but many of the State’s community colleges wanted to award “upside down” degrees that made them an effective 4 year.
Helen Sommers, then Chair of the Appropriations Committee, introduced a bill to have the House discuss how to proceed. While the session was stormy, the outcome gave us 4 year status and some of the community colleges could remove the title of community. Our colocated community college was one that removed the title of community. Higher Education institutions in Washington State are operating better without the concern of what class of students can be served. I regret not having the opportunity to profusely thank Rep Sommers for her creative solution that expended not only UW Bothell’s ability to serve but also every other state college/ university to do the same.
Another big project was designing and constructing a second entry or egress to the campus. That project involved the higher education construction budget as well as the transportation budget. It was complex, yet we managed to complete that construction phase the year after I stepped down as Chancellor.
I went over to the Seattle campus for two years to teach physics again with the intent to go back to UW Bothell to start a physics curriculum there. My first intro physics course at UW Bothell had 5 students registered. By the end of the second quarter, there were three students. It did not look hopeful; though I requested the administration to give me a second year offering the same course. This time, there were 20 students. The upshot of this, is that we very quickly hired a lecturer and offered sections! The new chancellor saw the need to offer science and technology at UW Bothell where only environmental sciences and Computer and Software Systems (CSS) were offered. So, I was asked to be founding director of a Science and Technology Program (S&T) that had to be developed! I welcomed the challenge to give more science and technology students opportunities to pursue their curiosity and passions. There were three of us as founding faculty of S&T; two chemists and me.
We started out pursuing an ABETaccredited electrical engineering major using UW Seattle as leverage. Those of you who know the accreditation process in engineering understand the steps we had to take; hiring faculty to create and teach courses to demonstrate accreditation criteria are being met. Also dovetailing was computer and software systems (CSS) that already existed but in its very own Program. A way was found to incorporate CSS into the new S&T Program. Biology that required a research bench lab be built; that was accomplished. Then came math, chemistry, mechanical engineering; and then, finally, we developed a physics major. One of the first faculty hired, Joey Key, to get the physics major going is an early member of the LIGO Collaboration. During this period, I served on the board of the Pacific Science Center, located in Seattle, and chaired their Science Education Advisory Committee; and I served as founding board member of King County Cultural Development Authority (4Culture).
The UW Bothell was still under Program curricula; as there was a clear conflict with titles of Program Directors at UW Bothell and Deans at UW Seattle. Just as S&T was starting to get a stride, the UW Regents gave authority to evolve UW Bothell and Tacoma Programs into Schools. In 2016, three years after we became the School of STEM, I retired. The School of STEM is now the largest of the five Schools on a campus serving approximately 6,000 students total. The campus today with 1,000 dorm beds and about 60% students of color is perhaps the most naturally diverse campus in the Pacific Northwest.
I had the benefit of UW Bothell having had a line of great leaders from its inception in 1989 before me and following me. I also had a great team in my administration! What an extraordinary experience it has been capped off with meeting my incredible wife, Cate, there.
Speaking of Cate, she and I were on our cutterrigged sailboat docked in Puget Sound preparing for another cruise to the San Juan Islands when I received a call from the Governor of Virginia telling me he wanted to appoint me to the Board of Visitors of The College of William & Mary. It was a memorable discussion with the Governor. I agreed.
This William & Mary Board, I served on, hired its first woman as president, who is still installed, since the venerable institution’s founding in 1693. Without a Medical School or an Engineering School, William & Mary just established the new School of Computing, Data Sciences and Physics. This should fit well with the JLab and BNL data center and eventual operation of the ElectronIon Collider collaboration.
Missing our four grandchildren, my wife and I settled solely in the PNW to be closer to them and their parents (our second son and his wife; and only daughter and her husband) while at the same time visiting with oldest son in Chicago and youngest son and wife in Vermont. Four adult children and four grandchildren.
My physics work also included culminating pion and kaon physics results that I find intriguing; but do not quite yet require sophisticated high computing power. Many researchers have studied the elastic charge and electroweak sector of QCD; and my work with my collaborators began with the pion elastic charge form factor that has resulted in publishing several calculated elastic and electroweak kaon form factor results as well. In the work on electroweak kaon form factors with Andrei Afanasev {Phys. Rev D55 (1 April 1997) p4380}, we show that employing our results from the pion and kaon elastic structure employed there, we can obtain the electroweak form factor and parameters, f+ and f, meeting existing data restrictions without adjusting any parameters! Still a novel result among other more encompassing and detailed multiple parameter calculations to match the growing number of precision experimental data. This result, however, became a clue to thinking that the kaon may simply be a strange excitation of the Flavor neutral pion. Let me explain further.
In another work, that revisits the old quark model approach with Stinson Lee {https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.09040.pdf} we showed that, in a 1D charged pseudoscalar meson model with no confining potential, that a numerical quantum number could be introduced in the simplest way, not only to think of the kaon as a flavor excited state of the pion, but also the D and the B are also excited flavor states. Only after I returned home from the sectional meeting did I realize this suggests the flavor states are coupled through their electroweak/semileptonic decays; and that a type of Flavor Excited pionic “atomic” structure can be imagined and more strongly connects the physics properties of these mesons. The 1D model calculated decay rates yield shorter lifetimes than the data; yet, inserting a linear potential will likely correct these life times as well as lighten the constituent quark masses toward more common values. The theoretical model has electroweak coupling constants that depend on the flavor. So, a more detailed calculation with a linear potential added is expected to require different values for the couplings and quark masses; yet the physics will remain. This means the measured meson masses, form factor data, charge radii and meson life times should be preserved. Nonetheless, the model points the way for how one might regroup this meson set; and in this very simple specific model, the square of the charge radii naturally scaling as pion excites to B with an asymptotic (heavy quark limit) value of 0.107fm2.
In relation to having more data available, I look forward to exploratory experiments from ee’D and ee’B sectors that should provide more clarification and precision.
My current role as Chair of the FPS forum includes organizing FPS sponsored sessions at APS meetings Those planned for the 2026 global meeting are included in the News section of this issue.
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