Helmut Reich - from Booster to books
Helmut Reich, well known as one of the main protagonists of CERN's proton synchrotron (PS) Booster, celebrated his 80th birthday in May. He joined the PS magnet group at CERN in 1955, as a young physicist-engineer, and after a decade of varied responsibilities, his abilities put him in the role for which he is so well remembered. In 1964, Pierre Germain initiated plans for a major PS upgrade. Intensity was limited by space-charge effects, and a higher injection energy would raise that limit. Helmut was given responsibility for a study on how this could best be achieved. A new 200 MeV linac was considered, as was an intermediate accelerator to raise the energy of the protons from the existing 50 MeV linac. However, it was Helmut's systematic assessment, in particular of Werner Hardt's multi-ring injectors, and his dogged insistence, that led to the choice of an 800 MeV slow-cycling booster consisting of four superposed rings.
To build the Booster, the Synchrotron Injector (SI) Division was created in 1968, with Giorgio Brianti as leader and Helmut as his deputy. In 1973, the SI Division was integrated into the MPS Division as the Booster Group (BR), with Helmut as its leader. Today, 30 years later, the Booster success story goes on; it provides high intensities for all CERN users, with ISOLDE as a direct customer, and will shape the ultra-high-density proton beam for the LHC.
Apart from accelerators, Helmut had other, perhaps deeper, interests. In 1983 he took early retirement to dedicate himself to research and teaching in psychology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. In his new career, he proved to be a prolific researcher and writer. His recent book Developing the Horizons of Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2002) summarizes his main post-CERN achievement: the development of Relational and Contextual Reasoning, or RCR. RCR offers solutions in decision-making situations that are seemingly without resolution. It does so by abandoning "oppositional", "binary", logic (true-false, right-wrong, friend-enemy...) in favour of "inclusive" considerations, taking into account the context (wave-particle duality comes to the mind of physicists). Helmut's new logic is the result of empirical studies, in which people were interviewed to probe the mental operations leading to opinions and decisions. CERN's Giuseppe Cocconi, Rolf Hagedorn, and former director-general Vicky Weisskopf, were among the interviewees. RCR has attracted interest as a well-tested theory of the human mind and as a tool for resolving ideological conflicts. Anyone interested in the rationale of decision making should take this book to heart.
Lev Barkov - from submarines to snakes
Lev Barkov, one of the leading physicists of the Budker Institute in Novosibirsk, celebrates his 75th birthday in October.
Barkov's early interests were related to measuring the energy spectra of fission neutrons, as part of a highly classified project to construct uranium-water nuclear reactors for atomic power stations, submarines and icebreakers. When, in 1955, this became de-classified, Barkov reported the work at the first conference on peaceful applications of atomic energy in Geneva. In 1952 he began participating in high-energy physics experiments at the Dubna synchrocyclotron, where he suggested and developed the technology for making diffraction grids on photoemulsion plates - a simple, reliable and very cheap solution, which was characteristic of his style in general.
A new period of activity began in 1967 when Barkov moved to the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk, where he continued studies of hyperons. He was one of those who actively backed the construction of the electron-positron collider VEPP-2M, and for experiments at this collider he suggested a unique detector with a magnetic field created by a superconducting solenoid and an optical spark chamber working at cryogenic temperatures and high pressure. The detector was successfully constructed by his young team, and the institute acquired invaluable experience of operations with liquid helium and in constructing large superconducting devices, which were used later while making the famous Siberian "snakes" - undulators and solenoids.
In the 1970s, together with Max Zolotorev, Barkov performed an experiment in which the rotation of the light polarization plane in vapours of atomic bismuth was discovered. This phenomenon indicated the weak interactions of electrons with nucleons caused by neutral currents, and the observation became one of the milestones of the Standard Model. Barkov was also the leader of the team constructing a new general-purpose detector, CMD-2, which combined many modern subsystems. This detector, installed at VEPP-2M in 1991, was successfully used until 2000 to study the properties of vector mesons. The upgrade of the VEPP-2M, to VEPP-2000, is now in progress, and will allow a study of the broader energy range with higher luminosity. A new detector, CMD-3, is also being constructed for experiments at VEPP-2000 by Barkov's pupils, who were fortunate to hear his lectures and work together with an enthusiastic teacher.
• A seminar dedicated to the 75th anniversary of Lev Barkov will be held in Novosibirsk, Russia, on 23-24 October 2003. For further information, see http://cmd.inp.nsk.su/conf/barkov2003.
Milos Lokajicek - interdisciplinary solutions
Milos Lokajicek celebrated his 80th birthday in August. After graduating from Charles University in Prague in 1948, he became a student of Václav Votruba, the founder of Czechoslovak elementary particle physics. In 1953 they published a paper together on generalizing the use of isotopic spin (which had been introduced by Heisenberg for nucleons) to other particles and short-lived resonances. Their collaboration was interrupted a year later, however, when the communist regime sentenced Lokajicek to seven years in jail when he refused to agree with the condemnation to death of the Czech politician Milada Horakova. Although freed after three and a half years, he was not allowed to continue to work in physics for a further 15 years.
Only in 1968 did Lokajicek return to physics, to work in the elementary particle-physics division of the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences, in the fields of phenomenology of elementary particle physics (diffractive scattering), radiobiology, hadron therapy, axiomatics of quantum theory, philosophy of natural sciences, etc. Lokajicek's scientific activity can be characterized by three features: rapid finding of the crucial unsolved problems, the original contribution to their solution based on an interdisciplinary approach, and the transferring of methods developed in one branch of science to another. He still gives lectures on radiobiology at Charles University.