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Laurence Rothman Awarded the 2012 Ioannes Marcus Marci Medal

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Laurence Rothman Awarded the 2012 Ioannes Marcus Marci Medal

Dr. Laurence Rothman was awarded the Ioannes Marcus Marci medal by the Czech Spectroscopic Society on September 6, 2012, at the 22nd International Conference on High Resolution Molecular Spectroscopy in Prague.

He received the medal for achievements in the development of spectroscopic databases. Dr. Rothman is the long-term director of the HITRAN molecular spectroscopic database project. The HITRAN articles are perennially among the most cited papers in the geosciences. The HITRAN user community also includes astrophysicists and researchers in many other fields of science, medicine and industry.

Presented annually, the I.M. Marci Medal is one of the most prestigious awards in the field of molecular spectroscopy. Johannes (Ioannes in Greek) Marcus Marci (13 June 1595 - 10 April 1667) was a Bohemian doctor and scientist, rector of the Charles University in Prague, and official physician to the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

Marci's works in optics were his most significant. He gave an explanation of the rainbow and of the coloring of thin films, established the relation between the refraction and chromaticity of a ray, examined the phenomenon of diffraction, and actually applied the principle that was discovered later by Christiaan Huygens (and named after Huygens).

Additional I.M. Marci Medals were presented to Nobel Laureate, Prof. Eric Cornell (University of Colorado/NIST), and to Prof. Eric Herbst (University of Virginia).

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AtomDB

High Energy Astrophysics
In extreme environments, where pressure, temperature, and density are high, atoms change the way they emit and absorb light. Electrons are stripped from nuclei, forming a plasma, and the ions emit X-rays when struck by free electrons. To assist astronomers in identifying atoms under these harsh conditions, the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian maintains the AtomDB database of X-ray spectra. This catalog provides essential information for studying conditions in many astrophysical environments, including those near black holes, stars, and neutron stars.
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HITRAN and HITEMP Database

Atomic and Molecular Physics
With techniques developed in quantum mechanics, molecular spectra can be modeled by a set of discrete fundamental parameters. The knowledge of these reference molecular spectroscopic parameters is essential to correctly characterize constituents of their environments, model their spectra and atmospheric conditions. Physicists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian maintain the HIgh-resolution TRANsmission (HITRAN) and HIgh TEMPerature (HITEMP) databases of molecular spectral parameters, along with the HITRAN Application Programming Interface (HAPI) which also enables one to access the database archive and process the data.
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PINTofALE (Package for Interactive Analysis of Line Emission)

Astrophysical environments are often strikingly different from those on Earth, but there’s no direct way for astronomers to measure conditions in space. Instead, they must infer environmental properties from the behavior of atoms, particularly the way they absorb and emit light. For this to work, researchers need to use databases of atomic spectra, which requires writing or using computer code. PINTofALE (Package for Interactive Analysis of Line Emission) is a software toolkit designed to streamline this process, giving astronomers a powerful way to use X-ray and ultraviolet atomic data without having to write their own code every time. The package was developed by researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and is provided for free as a service to astronomers.
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