Nobel Prize winner Hans A. Bethe, Cornell University professor emeritus of physics, has a new award named in his honor established by the American Physical Society (APS). The APS will announce the award at a reception on the occasion of Bethe's 90th birthday on July 2. Bethe is being honored for his "outstanding and numerous accomplishments in both astrophysics and nuclear physics," said Judy Franz, APS executive officer who is scheduled to make the announcement here. Bethe, who continues research in physics in his Cornell office in the Newman Laboratory of Nuclear Physics, is expected to attend the reception.

The Hans Bethe Prize, a cash award of $7,500, is to be awarded annually, beginning in 1998, for outstanding work in theory, experiment or observation in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, or closely related fields. The intention is to recognize outstanding achievements in one of these areas by a scientist world-wide, according to the APS. The Prize is endowed by donations from members of the Division of Nuclear Physics, the Division of Astrophysics and friends of Bethe. Cornell University and Los Alamos National Laboratory have made major contributions to the endowment.

Bethe, whose description of the nuclear processes powering the sun earned him a Nobel Prize in physics in 1967, has been at Cornell for 61 years. He was head of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the Manhattan Project, and he has played a leading role in the public debate about nuclear weapons, defense policy and the civilian control of nuclear power. He was one of the founders of the Federation of Atomic Scientists and was a member of the original Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Bethe's career spans the evolution of nuclear physics. He has made contributions to almost all phases of the problems of nuclear interactions and nuclear forces; he produced the first major paper on the theory of order-disorder in alloys; and his 1947 calculation of the Lamb shift paved the way for the revolution in quantum electrodynamics. Even today, Bethe continues to work at the forefront of research in astrophysics, on such diverse subjects as supernova explosions and the emission of neutrinos from thermonuclear reactions in the sun.

The APS is an organization of more than 41,000 physicists worldwide.