Charles Critchfield

Charles Critchfield, Los Alamos, 1940s

Charles Louis Critchfield (born June 7, 1910 in Shreve , Ohio , † February 12, 1994 in Los Alamos , New Mexico ) was an American theoretical nuclear physicist .

Critchfield studied mathematics at George Washington University with a bachelor's degree in 1934 and a master's degree in 1936 and received his doctorate in physics under Edward Teller in 1939 (as his first doctoral student). At George Washington University he also met George Gamow . As a post-doctoral student he was at the University of Rochester at the invitation of Victor Weisskopf and from 1940 as a Fellow of the National Research Council at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) with Eugene Wigner . He then taught for a year at Harvard University . During World War II, he first worked in ballistics at the IAS, where his collaboration with John von Neumann began, at the Carnegie Institution (Laboratory of Terrestrial Magnetism), where he invented new sabot which were soon used in anti-tank systems. From 1943 he was one of the first physicists in Los Alamos in the Manhattan Project . There he first worked on gun design for atomic bombs (which, thanks to his expertise, was finished a year before the availability of the fissile material) and later became head of the group for the development of atomic bomb detonators (especially for the implosion-based plutonium bomb Fat Man ).

In 1945 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . After the war he returned briefly to George Washington University and was from 1946 in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory , where he helped Wigner to set up the Queens College of Nuclear Knowledge. He became an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota in 1947 , where he did secret balloon research. He also used the balloons for research into cosmic rays. Critchfield became a professor at the University of Minnesota and spent 1952/53 in Los Alamos to help with calculations for the hydrogen bomb. In 1955, he went on to serve as vice president of research in the Convair division of General Dynamics in San Diego , which was working on the development of the Atlas rocket. In 1959 he was supposed to head DARPA , but he didn't want to give up his well-paid job at Convair. In 1960 he became an Associate Division Leader for Research at Whitaker Corporation, California, working on stealth technology. In 1961 he was about to take up a professorship at the University of Wisconsin , but instead took a position at Los Alamos National Laboratory , where he remained until his retirement in 1977 and beyond. In retirement, he helped create a story about the technology of the Manhattan Project.

In 1938 he published an article with Hans Bethe , which described the fusion of two protons to form deuteron , an important process in the generation of energy in the sun ( proton-proton reaction ).

literature

• Carson Mark , Edward Teller, Louis Rosen, Roger Meade Charles Louis Critchfield , Physics Today, February 1995, pp. 70f

Individual evidence

1. ^ Bethe, Critchfield The formation of deuterons by proton combination , Phys. Review, 54, 1938, 249-254