Boyce McDaniel
Boyce Dawkins McDaniel (born June 11, 1917 in Brevard , North Carolina , † May 8, 2002 in Ithaca , New York ) was an American physicist who dealt with particle accelerators .
Boyce McDaniel studied at Ohio Wesleyan University ( Bachelor's degree in 1938) and the Case School of Applied Science , where he made his master's degree in physics in 1940 . In 1943 he received his doctorate from Cornell University with Robert Bacher . Bacher also brought him to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos , where he played an important role in Robert R. Wilson's cyclotron team . He was also the last person to check the first detonated atomic bomb in the Trinity test in 1945 (he had to regularly measure the bomb's radiation and to do this he had to climb the test tower a few hours before it was detonated during a thunderstorm). From 1946 he was Assistant Professor and from 1955 Professor at Cornell University in the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies (LNS). He played a leading role in the construction of the 300 MeV electron synchrotron at the LNS (the world's first machine of its kind) and its successors. In 1967 he succeeded Robert R. Wilson as director of the laboratory (Wilson became Fermilab director), which he remained until his retirement in 1985. In 1972 he took a year off at the LNS in order to run the accelerator department at Fermilab in a stable manner over initial problems. In the mid-1970s, he suggested converting the 10 GeV synchrotron at the LNS into an 8 GeV electron positron storage ring, which was implemented in the CESR ( Cornell Electron Storage Ring ) (it operated from 1979), on which in particular B mesons was studied.
In addition to building and developing accelerators, he also carried out particle physics experiments ( K meson and lambda particle photo production, measurement of the electromagnetic form factors of the neutron). He invented the pair spectrometer for gamma rays with Robert Walker and was a pioneer of the gamma ray photon tagger technology (1953 with JW Weil).
McDaniel was a member of the National Academy of Sciences . He had been married since 1941 and had a daughter and a son.
literature
- Andrew Sessler, Edmund Wilson: Engines of Discovery . World Scientific, 2007
Web links
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | McDaniel, Boyce |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | McDaniel, Boyce Dawkins (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 11, 1917 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Brevard , North Carolina |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 8, 2002 |
| Place of death | Ithaca , New York |