M. Stanley Livingston

Milton Stanley Livingston (left, 1934)

Milton Stanley Livingston (born May 25, 1905 in Broadhead , Wisconsin , † August 25, 1986 ) was an American physicist . He was a pioneer in the field of accelerator physics .

Life

Livingston studied chemistry at Pomona College and then physics at Dartmouth College , where he received his master's degree. He was then a doctoral student of Ernest Lawrence , for whom he built the prototype of the cyclotron invented by Lawrence from 1930 at the University of California, Berkeley . On January 9, 1932, they successfully tested a specimen 10 inches in diameter that accelerated protons to 1.22 MeV . Lawrence received the Nobel Prize for the development in 1939.

After four years at Berkeley, he went to Cornell University , where he built the first cyclotron (of 2 MeV) outside of Berkeley (with a modest budget of $ 800). The cyclotron was used for investigations in experimental nuclear physics, where a collaboration with Hans Bethe and Robert Bacher came about in Cornell . Together they published several important articles on nuclear physics in Reviews of Modern Physics in 1936/37 , from which many physicists learned the then new subject. From 1938 to 1940 he built another large cyclotron at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He stuck to his cyclotron work during the Second World War. Now with the cyclotron u. A. Radionuclides produced for medical use.

After the war he took part in the "race" (especially with Lawrence in Berkeley) to build the first large particle accelerator based on the synchrotron principle (introduced by Edwin McMillan in Berkeley) and was involved in building the Brookhaven National Laboratory . Officially, he was still employed at MIT. May 1952, the Cosmotron built in Brookhaven was the first accelerator to reach the 1 GeV limit, soon increasing to 3 GeV.

In 1952, together with the theoreticians Hartland Snyder and Ernest Courant in Brookhaven, he developed the principle of strong focusing for synchrotrons , which was an important prerequisite for particle accelerators of ever higher energy (the concept was discovered independently by Nicholas Christofilos in 1949 ). This brought synchrotrons in the 30 GeV range into focus, which were planned simultaneously in Brookhaven, by Livingston in a Harvard-MIT collaboration and at CERN . The free exchange of ideas, especially with the Europeans, was a thorn in the side of the AEC at the time . Finally, Courant's design for Brookhaven prevailed in the USA.

From 1956 Livingston led the construction of the Cambridge Electron Accelerator (CEA), an electron synchrotron up to 6 GeV, which went into operation in 1962 and was a leader for some time before it was replaced by the SLAC . It was also an electron-positron storage ring. From 1967 Livingston was responsible for the construction of the Fermilab 200 GeV proton synchrotron (as co-director of Robert R. Wilson ). In 1970 he retired and settled with Santa Fe.

In 1934 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1954 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1970 he was accepted into the National Academy of Sciences . In 1986 he received the Enrico Fermi Award . Among other things, he was an honorary doctorate from the University of Hamburg (1967).

Web links

• Biography of Livingston and Lawrence at APS
• Ernest D. Courant: Milton Stanley Livingston 1905-1986. A Biographical Memoir. National Academy of Sciences, accessed December 3, 2015 .  (PDF file, 143 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Milton Stanley Livingston: The Production of high velocity hydrogen ions without the use of high voltages . PhD thesis. University of California, Berkeley 1931 ( online [PDF; accessed March 26, 2016]).