Kenneth W Edwards 1934-2026
Department of Physics, Carleton University 1967-2000
Kenneth Westbrook ("Ken") Edwards was a faculty member 1967 through 2000, specializing in experimental particle physics.
Ken was born July 22 1934 in Lansing, Michigan. The family moved several times and he grew up in Michigan and Chicago. He graduated from the University of Michigan with his Bachelor's in 1956, and Princeton University with his doctorate in 1961. After a summer at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, he spent six years at Iowa State University, first as a research associate and then as faculty. Ken joined Carleton in 1967, when our university’s size was about 5000 students, in his estimation. This was about a year after our new building was opened, which later, in 1972, was renamed after Gerhard Herzberg.
As a faculty member, Prof. Edwards’ experimental particle physics research from the 1960’s through 1990’s focused on major high-energy physics machines. These included the Argonne National Lab near Chicago, the DESY synchrotron in Hamburg Germany where he was part of the ARGUS[1] collaboration, and then CESR, the Cornell University Electron Storage Ring, where he was part of the CLEO collaboration. Experiment names are always an opportunity for creativity, and the name of the latter collaboration, being located at CESR, was chosen to make a play on "Caesar and Cleopatra".
Event reconstruction from CLEO, 1994.
In the ARGUS and CLEO collaborations, the Carleton group was engaged in tracking and b-physics. Carleton’s Science and Technology Centre built upgrade components for ARGUS. Ken Edwards was one of the principal investigators promoting Canada on the international scene of particle physics. He was an author of one of the major findings of the 1980's: observation of particle oscillation in the neutral beauty-sector with the ARGUS detector in 1987 at the DORIS accelerator at DESY.[2]
Based on the success of ARGUS, with the goal to study CP violation in B meson decays, the Carleton group was among the first international groups, along with McGill University, to join the CLEO collaboration in 1992. Until that time CLEO comprised only US institutions. It was an era when particle physics experiments became global. Prof. Edwards was one of the faculty members promoting this vision in Canada. One of the most cited CLEO papers was a measurement b → sγ radiative penguin decay.[3]
The CLEO collaboration in 1997.
His trainees included Denis Legacey (MSc 1976, for work at Argonne), Jae-Chul Yun (MSc 1984, PhD 1987, ARGUS), and K.W. McLean (postdoc, 1994-1996, CLEO). In an interesting example of academic connections, when McLean was at CLEO he passed on a lot of experiment knowledge to Alain Bellerive, who was there as part of his PhD work (McGill/Cornell). Some years later Alain joined us as faculty.
After 33 years on faculty, Ken retired in 2000. He maintained a strong connection to the Physics Department thereafter. He lived walking distance from campus, and came to Carleton nearly daily except parts of some summers when he drove to spend time at the family farmhouse in rural Michigan – just north of the 45th parallel, so due west of Ottawa. He retained his interest in science news, our seminars and socials like the annual potluck in December. As the years progressed he remained a very determined and discerning man, always keen to hear and read what physics was being done and the stories behind the accomplishments.
Ken Edwards passed away in January 2026 at the age of 91 [4, 5]. He is missed in our Department. Our thoughts go out to the family.
Written January 2026 by Profs. Alain Bellerive, Paul Johns, and Kevin Graham.
1. For more on ARGUS, see the article Physics with ARGUS, Physics Reports 276, 224-405 (1996).
The Carleton authors were K.W. Edwards, J.-C. Yun.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0370-1573(96)00008-7
2. Landmark paper from the ARGUS group, Observation of B0 - B ̅0 mixing, Phys. Lett. B 192, 245-252 (1987). The Carleton authors were K.W. Edwards, H. Kapitza, J.-C. Yun.
https://doi.org/10.1016/0370-2693(87)91177-4
3. Seminal CLEO paper, First measurement of the rate for the inclusive radiative penguin decay b → sγ,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 2885-2889 (1995). The Carleton authors were K.W. Edwards, M. Ogg, D.I. Britton. In addition A. Bellerive, then a graduate student at McGill, was an author.
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.74.2885
4. Obituary,
https://pilonfamily.ca/tribute/details/3627/Ken-Edwards/obituary.html#t…
5. More detailed family history,
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/291516505/kenneth_westbrook-edwards