Edward Lofgren

Edward Joseph Lofgren (born January 18, 1914 in Chicago , Illinois , † September 5, 2016 or September 6, 2016 in Oakland , California ) was an American physicist who worked on particle accelerators .

life and work

Lofgren studied at the University of California, Berkeley , where he graduated in 1938 and then worked on cyclotrons as an assistant in Ernest Orlando Lawrence's group from 1938 to 1940 . During World War II he was a group leader in Los Alamos in the Manhattan Project . This work also resulted in his dissertation in Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in 1945. From 1946 to 1948 he was at the University of Minnesota , but kept his contacts in Berkeley, where he finally entered the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and stayed there until his retirement in 1982. He was involved in all major accelerator projects there, starting with the Bevatron , with the Cosmotron, the first accelerator in the GeV area. After completion in 1954, he was the group leader responsible for the Bevatron.

In the 1960s he led a design team at the LBNL for a national 200 GeV proton synchrotron, which was not realized at the LBNL as hoped, but in the end in the newly founded Fermilab (with a different design than that of Lofgren).

From 1973 to 1977 he was Associate Director of the LBNL. During this time, the Super Hilac (Super Heavy Ion Linear Accelerator) was built (to replace the HILAC built in 1957, in operation in 1972), a linear accelerator for heavy ions. Five transuranic elements were found there and pioneering work was also carried out on the use of heavy ions in cancer therapy. When coupled with the old Bevatron, it became the Bevalac heavy ion accelerator (in operation until 1993). Lofgren also initiated research into the use of the heavy ion accelerator for nuclear fusion at the LBNL.

He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . From 1967 to 1970 he was with the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP).

literature

• Andrew Sessler, Edmund Wilson Engines of Discovery , World Scientific 2007.
• American Men and Women of Science. 13th Edition, Volume 4, RR Bowker company, New York and London 1976, ISBN 0-8352-0869-9 , p. 2666.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In Memoriam: Legendary Lab Physicist Ed Lofgren (1914-2016)
2. ^ William Barletta, Jose Alonso: Edward Joseph Lofgren. In: Physics Today. 70, 2017, p. 69, doi : 10.1063 / PT.3.3473 .
3. ↑ To the Super Hilac, photo  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.