Kenneth Green

This article is about the physicist Kenneth Green. For other people, see Ken Green .

George Kenneth Green , called Ken Green, (* 1911 ; † August 1977 ) was an American physicist who dealt with particle accelerators .

Green studied at the University of California, Berkeley , where he was part of Ernest Orlando Lawrence's group. After the Second World War he was at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) with M. Stanley Livingston , who built the Cosmotron there. After discovering the strong focus of Livingston, Ernest Courant and Snyder, Green implemented this idea (in competition with the Europeans at CERN ) at the BNL in the construction of the Alternating Gradient (AG) synchrotron, which went into operation in 1960 and reached 33 GeV. He worked with John Blewett . In the 1960s there were conflicts within the BNL about the direction of research to be taken between experimental particle physicists (such as Maurice Goldhaber , the director of the laboratory) and accelerator developers. The next larger machine (in the 200 GeV range) after the AGS was to be built by Berkeley according to internal agreements (and was ultimately implemented in the Fermilab), and Green wanted to concentrate research on superconducting magnets and the development of a collider for the next but one generation of accelerators , his opponents preferred to invest the research money in experiments on the accelerator while it was running. Green was therefore replaced in 1969 as head of the AGS. Green then devoted himself to alternative (solar) energy supply for the BNL and the project study for the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), which was built from 1978 and whose rings went into operation from 1982 to 1984. Together with Renate Chasman he developed the Chasman Green Lattice, which was later used a lot as a building block for synchrotron sources. He was also involved in the development of the ISABELLE accelerator at the BNL, the next major accelerator project of the BNL after the AGS under the direction of Green's successor Blewett.

literature

• Andrew Sessler, Edmund Wilson: Engines of Discovery. World Scientific 2007.

Web links

• Obituary at CERN, pdf