James Lattimer

James Lattimer is a nuclear astrophysicist who works on the dense nuclear matter equation of state and neutron stars. He is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University. He is an American Physical Society Fellow (2001), and has received a Guggenheim (J.S.) Fellowship (1999), a Sloan (Alfred P.) Fellowship (1982), and the Fullam (Ernest F.) Award from Dudley Observatory (1985). In 2015, Lattimer was awarded the Hans Bethe Prize for "outstanding theoretical work connecting observations of supernovae and neutron stars with neutrino emission and the equation of state of matter beyond nuclear density."

Lattimer has made a number of fundamental contributions to the field of nuclear astrophysics, with a particular focus on neutron stars. One of his biggest impacts was modeling the birth of neutron stars from supernovae in 1986 with then-research assistant professor Adam Burrows. This came just six months before the closest supernova in modern history (SN 1987A, in the LMC). Their paper predicted the signature of neutrinos from supernovae that was subsequently validated by neutrino observations, from SN 1987A on Feb. 23, 1987.

In work that led to his PhD thesis, Lattimer and his advisor David N. Schramm first argued that the mergers of neutron stars and black holes would result in the ejection of neutron-rich matter in sufficient quantities to explain the origin of r-process elements such as gold and platinum. Later, with collaborators, he demonstrated decompressing neutron-star matter from both neutron star-black hole and neutron star-neutron star mergers would form a natural r-process that would match observed patterns.

More recently, Lattimer and collaborators suggested that the recently observed rapid cooling of the neutron star in the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant is the first direct evidence for superfluidity and superconductivity in neutron star interiors.