Career
Bjørn Wiik lived in his home town Bruvik until he began his physics studies at Germany"s Technical University of Darmstadt. In 1965, he got his doctorate degree there. Two years later he began working at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California.
In 1972, Wiik returned to Germany, to the German Electron Synchrotron (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) in Hamburg where, four years later, he was appointed lead scientist
In 1978, Wiik and his collaborators began using Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron"s newly commissioned PETRA electron-positron storage ring to look for hard-gluon bremsstrahlung events that would provide experimental support for the existence and role of gluons in mediating strong interactions among quarks. Wiik and his team soon observed and reported a type of event never described before: three particle-jets whose momenta lay in a plane.
These results, widely believed to represent the after-effects of two quarks plus a gluon, were soon confirmed by many other groups. In 1995, the European Physical Society awarded its Prize for High Energy and Particle Physics to four physicists representing the TASSO collaboration (Paul Söding, Bjørn Wiik, Günter Wolf, and Sau Lan Wu) for demonstrating the existence of the gluon.
Already during his stay at SLAC, Wiik had proposed a new type of particle accelerator, which would be based on colliding a beam of protons with a beam of electrons.
In 1980, this idea took concrete form with the creation at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron of the hadron-electron ring facility Humanities in the European Research Area). Wiik was also responsible for proposing and overseeing the implementation of a superconducting linear accelerator for Tera-electron-volt energies, TESLA.