Hermann Grunder to head Argonne Lab
Hermann Grunder, for 15 years the dynamic director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), is to become director of the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. He succeeds Yoon I Chang, the associate laboratory director for engineering research who has served as interim director since July 1999.
Grunder foresaw the vital superconducting technology objective for Jefferson's CEBAF accelerator. Under his leadership the laboratory was completed on cost and on schedule and began operations in 1994. Christoph Leemann, recently named Jefferson Lab deputy director, becomes interim director during the search for a new director.
Well known in particle and nuclear physics circles, Grunder played a major role in pioneer heavy ion work at Berkeley. He received the Distinguished Associate Award from the US Department of Energy (DOE) in 1996, and the US Senior Scientist Award from Germany's Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1979. A native of Basel, Switzerland, Grunder holds a doctorate in experimental nuclear physics from the University of Basel and a master's degree in mechanical engineering from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
Argonne was the first US national laboratory, chartered in 1946. With sites in Illinois and Idaho, it has become one of the DOE's largest research centres, with approximately 4200 employees and an annual operating budget of about $465 million.
The University of Chicago has been Argonne's manager and partner throughout its history. The laboratory was formed in 1946 as an outgrowth of the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago where, in 1942, Enrico Fermi's team produced the first controlled self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. From 1964 until 1979, Argonne was the home of the 12.5 GeV ZGS, the world's highest energy weak focusing proton synchrotron. The laboratory celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1996.
Today, Argonne performs research across a broad spectrum of scientific and technical areas and is home to a wide array of unique research instruments and facilities, including the Advanced Photon Source.
Baier 70th birthday
27 September marked the 70th birthday of eminent particle physics theorist Vladimir Nikolaevich Baier, head of the theory group at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk. He started his scientific career in Novosibirsk soon after the foundation of the Budker Institute and played an important role in the formation of its theory division. Professor Baier is known for his fundamental contributions to quantum electrodynamics at high energies, including the theory of inelastic processes, radiative corrections and radiative polarization. Together with his students he formulated the operator approach to quantum electrodynamics in external fields and developed a universal quasi-classical method for the description of high-energy processes. During recent years his team developed a new theory of interactions of electrons, positrons and photons with oriented monocrystals. For many years, Baier has been teaching at Novosibirsk University. Many of his pupils have become well-known scientists.
Light entertainment
As a medium of our fundamental senses, light is essential for all forms of visual art. Light is also the basis for many industrial and research instruments. Specialist company Electron Tubes is well known for its light-detection products including photon-counting tubes, hemispherical photomultipliers and the smallest ultrarugged light detector in the world.
As part of its commitment to light, Electron Tubes recently took up the opportunity of working with kinetic artist Peter Keene, who draws inspiration from industrial and technological equipment. The company supplied him with a set of 8 inch hemispherical photomultipliers to create a kinetic sculpture to react to audience movement.
See "http://www.electrontubes.com".
John Blewett 1910-2000
Accelerator pioneer John Blewett died on 7 April, just a few days short of his 90th birthday. Born and educated in Toronto, he completed his PhD at Princeton in 1936. After a postdoctoral year at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, in the twilight of the Rutherford era, Blewett worked at General Electric's Research Laboratory from 1937 until 1946. There, in 1945, he calculated that the energy of a beam of circulating electrons should lose energy through the dissipation of radiation, resulting in a tiny reduction in the radius of the electron orbit. Following this prediction, "synchrotron radiation" was duly observed at General Electric in 1947.
Meanwhile, in 1946, Blewett had moved to Brookhaven, where he stayed for the remainder of his long and active career. He contributed to the development and construction of a series of major machines at Brookhaven - the Cosmotron, the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) and the Light Source, as well as working for the Isabelle collider. Blewett proposed applying the principle of strong focusing to linear accelerators immediately after the invention of this principle for synchrotrons in 1952.
From 1953 until 1954, at the invitation of CERN machine pioneer Odd Dahl, Blewett worked with the small group designing CERN's Proton Synchrotron. US Cosmotron experience and the design approach for the new AGS were thus integrated into European thinking.
In 1993 Blewett was awarded the American Physical Society's Robert R Wilson Prize.