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Theoretical physicists working at a blackboard collaboration pod in the Beecroft building.
Credit: Jack Hobhouse

Frank Close OBE FRS

Emeritus Professor

Sub department

  • Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics

Research groups

  • Particle theory
Frank.Close@physics.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: 01865 (2)73969
Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, room 60.24
  • About
  • Publications

Frank Close is Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics, and Fellow Emeritus at Exeter College. He was formerly Head of Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, vice President of the British Science Association and Head of Communications and Public Understanding at CERN. He was awarded the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics for his 'outstanding contributions to the public undxerstanding of physics' in 1996, an OBE for 'services to research and the public understanding of science' in 2000, and the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for communicating science in 2013. He is the only professional physicist to have won a British Science Writers Prize on three occasions.

Author of 20 books about science, the latest - "Trinity, The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History" (Penguin 2020) - is about the relationship between Oxford professor Rudolf Peierls and his assistant, the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs. He has just completed writing "The Mystery of Mass", a biographical history of the Higgs boson, which will be published by Allen Lane in July 2022 - the 10th anniversary of discovery of the Higgs Boson.

Research interests

QCD Phenomenology, Glueballs, Exotic Hadrons
History of Nuclear and Particle Physics

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