Jefferson Lab suffers two retirements
Jefferson Lab associate director, Ronald M Sundelin, retired in January. He led the contingent of superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) experts who migrated to Newport News from Cornell University in the mid-1980s, when the laboratory adopted SRF technology for building the CEBAF accelerator. More recently he directed the laboratory's Office of Technical Performance. In retirement he plans to take up astrophysics.
One month earlier, principal scientist Charles K Sinclair, who is known especially for advancing the science and technology of producing, measuring and employing high-energy polarized electron beams, took his retirement from Jefferson Lab. He has served as deputy head and later acting head of the laboratory's Accelerator Division.
Most recently Sinclair has been involved in Cornell University's development of an energy recovery linac to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a much larger machine of this kind for the production of high-brilliance, very short-pulse X-rays.
George Dixon Rochester 1908-2001
After a long and full life, George Rochester, teacher, researcher and university administrator par excellence, died on Boxing Day.
As a researcher he will always be known as the co-discoverer with Clifford Butler of the so-called V-particles. The discovery of a first strange event in 1946 was followed by the observation of a second in the summer of the following year. An exhaustive analysis of the two events was published at the end of 1947. This was a breakthrough in particle physics that led to great developments, particularly with the new accelerators.
As Ian Butterworth described in his excellent obituary of Clifford Butler (CERN Courier September 1999 p40), the two particles observed to decay were the first to be seen of a new class of K-mesons and hyperons. Pais in 1952, followed by Gell-Mann and Nishijima, provided the theory and the world of "strangeness" was launched. Although GDR, as he was affectionately known, never mentioned the matter - and would have been very cross with me for what follows - it is remarkable, to say the least, that the Nobel Prize was not awarded for this seminal discovery. All of the ingredients were there: reputations put firmly on the line, superb technical and interpretative skill and a very big piece in the fundamental particle jigsaw put in place. Remarkable, indeed.
Rochester was born on 4 February 1908 at Wallsend near Newcastle upon Tyne, England. His father was a blacksmith and some of his skills rubbed off on his son, whose experimental skills in later life were of a high order.
A scholarship took him to the then Armstrong College of Durham University (now the University of Newcastle) where a keen researcher, W E Curtis - a noted spectroscopist - provided great stimulus. After his PhD, a year at Stockholm University as an Earl Grey Fellow and two years at Berkeley as a Commonwealth Fellow - still working in spectroscopy - he moved, in 1937, to an assistant lectureship in physics at Manchester University. There he came under the spell of the impressive Patrick Blackett and soon transferred to cosmic-ray physics. Cloud chamber expertise led to a number of interesting results, culminating in the V-particle work.
After Blackett's move to Imperial College and a spell as acting director at Manchester, Rochester moved to Durham in 1955, where he led the physics department to great things. Most notably his wisdom, friendliness and single-mindedness of purpose gave rise, eventually, to the present leading research schools in elementary particle theory, astrophysics and astronomy.
Rochester became Durham's first pro-vice-chancellor and his contributions to university administration were legion.
In the early years of his long retirement he took an interest in the history of astronomy in Durham and provided advice - but only when asked for.
Physics has lost a distinguished practitioner and his colleagues and students a firm friend. His wife, Ida, his constant companion for more than 60 years, died just six days later.
Arnold Wolfendale
Frans Heyn 1944-2001
Frans Heyn passed away on 29 December after a long illness. A biochemist by training, he received his PhD in 1975 and went on to become head of the Department of Physical and Biological Sciences at the Netherlands Ministry of Education and Science, with responsibility for research in the fields of physics, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, earth sciences and medical sciences.
In 1976 he began his long association with CERN as Netherlands delegate to the laboratory's finance committee. He then became delegate to the Council and Committee of Council in 1980. In January 1981 he joined the organization as director of administration - a post that he occupied throughout Herwig Schopper's eight year term of office as director-general.
In 1990 Heyn became the first leader of the new Administrative Support Division - a post that he held until his appointment to the role of adviser in the office of the director-general, Carlo Rubbia, where he remained in the same capacity under the next two director-generals, Chris Llewellyn-Smith and Luciano Maiani. Here he devoted a great deal of time and energy to relations with the European Union and the countries of the former Soviet Union.
He was greatly involved in the ISTC and INTAS before they even officially came into being. Thanks to the ISTC, several CERN experiments - those at the LHC in particular - have benefited from advanced technologies and new sources of finance for equipment manufactured in Russia. Heyn played a vital role in INTAS and, in particular, helped research teams to keep going at a time when the countries of the former Soviet Union were experiencing critical financial problems. Shortly before he died, he agreed to take part in a UNESCO task force responsible for defining a strategy for the revival of scientific co-operation in the Balkans. He was actively involved in this area, literally right up to the last moment.
William Walkinshaw 1916-2001
William ("Bill") Walkinshaw, one of the pioneers of particle accelerator theory in the UK, died on 20 November at the age of 85.
At the beginning of the Second World War he was drafted to the Telecommunications Research Establishment to work on problems related to microwave radar. It was a natural step after the war for him to join D W Fry's particle accelerator group, where he worked on the theory of electron linear accelerators and synchrotrons. Walkinshaw is particularly known for his contribution, working with L B Mullet and R B R Shersby-Harvie, to the design of the very first travelling-wave electron linac. Powered by a wartime magnetron, this machine produced a beam of 0.5 MeV electrons towards the end of 1946. A 4 MeV machine was demonstrated in the following year and studies of these machines for medical use followed.
In 1951 the group moved from Malvern to Harwell and started a study of a possible high-intensity proton linear accelerator of 600 MeV. A severe problem was that of transverse focusing, which was only really resolved by the invention of the strong focusing principle at Brookhaven leading to the use of quadrupoles for focusing. Improvements in the performance of cyclotrons led to the cancellation of the 600 MeV project, but the design of the first sections of this accelerator formed the basis of the injector for CERN's first alternating gradient synchrotron, built by John Adams.
The strong focusing principle gave rise to many ideas for new accelerators worldwide. In the UK, attention centred on the possibility of using "spiral-ridged" magnetic fields to construct high-energy machines with very high intensities. Orbit resonances, however, proved to be a major difficulty - one became known as the "Walkinshaw resonance" - and no feasible design was found. The decision to build the conventional Nimrod machine at the Rutherford Laboratory gave Walkinshaw's group the chance for the first time to make extensive use of digital computers for engineering design calculations.
In the early 1960s, interest at Rutherford switched from accelerator design to the problems of coping with the voluminous data flowing from newly working accelerators. It was natural that Walkinshaw should take charge of this data processing. At first Rutherford lacked sufficient computing power on site and Walkinshaw found himself acting as an impresario orchestrating the use of computers away from home.
In 1967 an IBM system360/75 was delivered to Rutherford. In spite of many teething problems with the new system, after a couple of years the machine was processing users' data around the clock and Rutherford had been established as a most reliable and productive computer centre. In 1970 the laboratory was funded to buy a new supercomputer, a 360/195, with the condition that 50% of processing power be made available to university departments.
Walkinshaw, aware of the wretchedness of having to travel to compute, started a programme to develop Remote Job Entry (RJE) stations - small computers connected to the centre via a phone line. The programme was a great success. Users kept data at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory but worked from their home department or from CERN, which hosted one of these stations. The RJE project naturally led into full networking, and by the time Walkinshaw retired in 1979 the UK Science Research Council had a network joining its laboratories and most UK universities. Subsequently this network has evolved into the UK academic network, which links all UK academic institutions and runs at speeds of gigabits per second.
J W Burren and J D Lawson