2000 Seaborg Award: Richard L. “Dick” Hahn

Award Statement C&EN (Pages 10 & 12)

On a summer day in 1945, 10-year-old RICHARD L. HAHN was riding the subway in New York City while a nearby commuter read the New York Times. It was a day Hahn will never forget.

“I saw the front page of the paper, and the headline announced the dropping of the first atomic bomb over Japan,” Hahn recalls. “That was the very moment I became interested in nuclear science, and I’ve been interested ever since.”

A native of New York City, Hahn studied nuclear chemistry at Columbia University, where he received a Ph.D. degree in 1960.

Most recently, Hahn’s interests led to his involvement with construction of the high-profile Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), near Sudbury, Ontario. The observatory, located 6,800 feet underground, began operations last summer and is designed to detect neutrino interactions as they occur in real time. Hahn played a substantial role in designing the chemical aspects of the neutrino detector, which contains 1,000 tons of pure heavy water, D₂O, in a 12-meter-wide transparent acrylic plastic vessel, surrounded by 7,000 tons of purified light water, which acts as shielding.