Seth Putterman
Seth J. Putterman (born 1945) is an American physicist. He studied physics at Cooper Union in New York for two years before transferring to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, graduating in 1966. In 1970 he received his doctorate under George Uhlenbeck at the Rockefeller University in New York. His PhD work dealt with quantum fluids and he contributed ot the theory of superfluidity of helium. In 1972 he received the Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Putterman is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of  California, Los Angeles. He is known to have an eclectic approach to research topics that broadly revolves around energy-focusing phenomena in nonlinear, continuous systems, with particular interest in turbulence, sonoluminescence, sonofusion and pyrofusion. His group demonstrated X-ray generation from the triboelectric effect by peeling a strip of Scotch tape in 2008. Putterman is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Acoustical Society of America.