I acquired my plate from a visiting postdoc. He was fascinated to learn that one can customize license plates in the United States. I bought his car when he went back to Japan, mostly because of the GLAST (Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope) license plate. Later, I sold the car to another postdoc and kept the plate. Jonathan Ormes also had a GLAST plate when he was director of research at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Jonathan moved to Denver, so I don’t know what’s happened to it, but at one time there were an East Coast and West Coast GLAST.

Tune Kamae, SLAC National Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, California

I had applied for this plate with the notion that I could get my life a bit more organized, provided there was a constant metaphorical reminder close at hand. The plate DELTA S is the term for the change in entropy, and was intended to be a reminder to keep up on maintenance, exercise, eat the right foods, keep organized files, de-fragment my hard drive, yada, yada, yada... My wife, Karen, agreed that this would be a noble gesture, and we did eventually bring some order to our nest. Nearly four years have passed since mounting that plate. Now we have a two-year-old son, Ronnie, who has done a fine job of restoring entropy in our household. Perhaps we can take some comfort in the fact that the term is variable.

Jeff Geraci, Anaheim, California

Back in the days of the Superconducting Super Collider Central Design Group, my family presented me with license plates signifying the 20-TeV on 20-TeV collisions we planned for the SSC. It was a private source of pleasure for my colleagues and me. The world at large didn’t notice. It was on an ancient Volvo, which blended in with all of the other ancient Volvos in Berkeley. The plate hangs in my garage now. It’s a memento from one of the most intense times I’ve been through. It’s a treasure from that great time.

Chris Quigg, Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois

I’ve had the custom license plate SOLITON for 30 years. I transfer it from one car to the next. In many ways a car behaves like a soliton: It is a wave localized in a certain region of space, it keeps its shape when traveling, and it interacts with other solitons (cars) emerging unchanged, most times, perhaps with only a small phase shift.

About 28 years ago, I was attending a conference at a hotel in Fort Lauderdale. During the meeting, an employee interrupted to find the owner of a car parked in a restricted spot. The employee spelled the tag S-O-L-I-T-O-N and then pronounced it. I stood up to tell the employee that I was the owner, right as a physicist in the audience said something like, "A soliton at rest, parked outside? Don’t worry, it will probably collapse and disappear rapidly." Everyone burst into laughter. As we walked toward the parking lot, I tried to explain the meaning of the word soliton to the puzzled employee.

L.N. Blanco, Miami, Florida

I have Illinois license plate PHYSICS on my 2005 Toyota Camry. I believe that it cannot get more physics than that! The story is simple, unlike Tom Nash’s (Oct/Nov 07). I work at Fermilab and I used to have a Toyota pickup truck with 900 GEV plates (the TeV ring energy at that time). When I traded my truck in for a Camry, I had to get new plates because Illinois does not allow truck plates on cars. I applied for PHYSICS as my first choice and, much to my surprise, I got it.

Jamie Santucci, Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois

My license plate was originally suggested a year ago by my two young daughters. The plate, XRAY BMR, is on a BMW 330 convertible. It applies to both the car and me, since I’m helping to develop a new miniature X-ray tube to treat breast cancer. My colleagues think it’s cute, but I haven’t got many questions outside of work. Maybe people are scared that the car emits X-rays.

Steve Axelrod, Los Altos, California

When I visited my hometown in Wisconsin, relatives and friends kept calling me “the scientist” because I worked at Argonne National Lab and later Fermilab. I responded, in time, with this vanity plate.

Richard Janes, Bellevue, Iowa

It’s a lot of fun and a great conversation starter using aspects of my work as a physicist on license plates. Friends are quick to spot whenever a new one goes on the car, and invariably ask what it means. For some I provide a brief explanation, but for my weekly hiking group there is ample time to also give some background about the significance of the research. Those not familiar with Los Alamos National Laboratory are pleasantly surprised to learn that there is basic research going on in addition to work on nuclear weapons.

I try to come up with a new license plate every year. I am proudest of the very first one: NUCLEON, because it contains my first name. On the other hand, one wag suggested it was an invitation to nuke Leon.

The operation of a high intensity proton linear accelerator at Los Alamos yielded large fluxes of pi mesons and led to PION. The advent of the quark revolution and development of a gauge theory based on the color degree of freedom, involving different flavors of quarks interacting with glue, led to a long research period and many license plates: COLOUR, FLAVOUR (British spellings), GAUGE, UP, DOWN, and GLUE. At MIT a bag model of the interaction of quarks and glue was developed, and led to BAG.

QBARQ represents a meson made of a quark and anti-quark. DIMESON signifies a particle composed of two quarks and two anti-quarks. OMEGA-* is a particle comprised of three strange quarks. (An excited state is normally denoted with an asterisk, which is not available in New Mexico, but the Zia symbol is close enough.)

I have about 30 plates in my basement. I’ve kept every one, with one exception. A local restaurateur, who is also a scientist at the laboratory, recently decided to turn a portion of his restaurant into a bar, which is a place for people to meet and talk science. He named the bar Quark. I told him I had a plate by the same name and let him borrow it.

A strange thing happened involving that plate back in 1975. I was driving home, and in my rear view mirror I noticed the car behind me was uncomfortably close. I could easily make out the QUARKS California plate on the front of the car. I had no doubt that the car belonged to Murray Gell-Mann, who had earlier proposed such fractionally charged particles and gave them the name that stuck. He was visiting Los Alamos that summer, but was not in the car at the time; I think his wife was behind the wheel. I was concerned about a possible collision of quarks, but fortunately no accident occurred.

Leon Heller, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico

Jym Clendenin, a retired SLAC physicist, acquired his plates about 15 years ago when he was commissioning the SLC polarized electron source. E MINUS stands for electrons and their negative electric charge. Clendenin was in charge of the SLAC linac electron injector until his recent retirement. Common comment received:
“That’s a really poor grade!”

Jym Clendenin, SLAC National Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, California

Ben Smith, a retired SLAC engineer, acquired his plates about 15 years ago when he was designing and installing the Stanford Linear Collider positron source. It stands for positron, which is the antiparticle for the electron, which are accelerated by the two-mile-long SLAC linac where he works. Common question received: Does that stand for educational excellence? People at SLAC often say, “Be sure not to run into E MINUS or you’ll be annihilated!”

Ben Smith, SLAC National Accelerator Center,
Menlo Park, California

I did not respond in time for the license plate issue, but I do have a good one from an old photo taken while on leave at Caltech in the ’70s. The car (right) belonged to Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Laureate in Physics. I don't know if he still has it.

Gene Sprouse, American Physical Society

I liked the plates shown in the current issue, but I think my Virginia plate is more original—FYZYKZ!

Greg Hood, Tidewater Community College, Virginia Beach, VA

I got this plate when I moved to Brookhaven National Laboratory to work in the theory division. I chose a plate with the gauge group SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1), the mathematical structure that underlies the theory of particle physics. A passerby once asked me if I was a lawyer; he had interpreted the plate as “Sue three, sue two, you won.”

Scott Willenbrock, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Here is a photo of the license plate I used to have when I was a resident of California: "QUBITS"

This plate used to attract a lot of attention: people would always ask me what does your license plate mean? When I'd tell them, they would often look disappointed. When I asked why, they invariably said that they thought that it was a reference to the fact that the Bible contains measurements in "cubits." Another amusing anecdote was that I used to park my car with these plates besides Murray Gell-Mann's car with a "QUARKS" plate when I was a postdoc at the Santa Fe Institute.

At one point Ben Schumacher, who invented the word "qubit" visited and I missed the amazing opportunity of getting a photo of two inventors of "q" words beside cars with these words as license plates. I'll never forgive myself for that missed opportunity.

Dave Bacon, University of Washington

My license plate "GMUNU" representing the metric tensor in Einstein's theory of relativity seems a bit cryptic for most people. Even to some physicists I've had to explain what it was about.

"G WAVE" for gravitational wave did not work all that well when attached to a green card. Someone in Louisiana said "Oh, you are from Tulane, the green wave". "G WAVE" belongs to my wife, Gabriela Gonzalez who works in the LIGO experiment. We both have the same plates since we moved to Louisiana.

Jorge Pullin, Louisiana State University

I decided to get the the plate after speculating on there being an energy limit to a photon due to the cosmic ray spectrum (photon count at different energy levels), colliding photons can create electron positron pairs, gamma rays from naturally radioactive decay appear mainly below 1 Gev, and just increasing the energy density enough may pecipitate particles with mass.

Thomas Cechner, Louisiana State University

I am an architect who invented a children's toy I call, Qubits(r) - which is patented, and the trademark is registered. Lucky for me the Oregon plates allow 6 letters, I love fly fishing so the surcharge went to Save the Salmons.

Somewhat interesting side note connection for quantum buffs - In 1979 I wrote a letter to Richard Feynman describing my modular geometry and how I thought it related to quantum particles, he actually wrote a very nice letter back to me. Now that geometry is the basis for a toy that kids love to play with.

Mark Burginger, Qubits Toy Company