Harold Furth

Harold Paul Furth (born January 13, 1930 in Vienna , † February 21, 2002 in Philadelphia ) was an American physicist who was a leader in fusion research and plasma physics in the United States.

life and work

Furth attended the International School in Geneva and came to the USA with his parents in 1941. He studied at Harvard University (Master's degree in 1956) and one year at Cornell University . In 1960 he received his doctorate from Harvard. Then worked 1956 to 1967 on the fusion research project of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (then Lawrence Radiation Laboratory). In 1967 he moved to Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and became professor of astrophysics at Princeton University . From 1967 to 1978 he was one of the directors of the experimental department at PPPL, in 1978 he became associate director and head of the research department, in 1980 program director and 1981 to 1990 director of the laboratory. He eventually resigned for health reasons. In 1999 he retired as a professor, but remained active in research at the PPPL until his death.

In the 1960s he developed important theories on plasma instabilities in nuclear fusion reactor experiments, which were shown, for example, in the pinch experiments that he carried out with Stirling Colgate at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. In 1963, together with Marshall Rosenbluth and John Killeen, he published a theory of resistive instabilities (triggered by the line resistance in the plasma) in magnetically confined plasmas. In 1965/66, at an international workshop in Trieste , there was a fruitful collaboration with the leading Russian plasma physicists Roald Sagdeev and Alexander Galeev. Together with Rosenbluth, they developed a transport theory of the complicated paths of particles in the tokamak . After the announcement of record temperatures of 10 million degrees Celsius on the Russian T-3 tokamak in 1968, he initiated his own tokamak projects in Princeton, which confirmed the results of the Soviet scientists in 1970. The PLT (Princeton Large Torus) even reached temperatures of 60 million degrees Celsius in 1978. With Fred Tenney and John Dawson, he developed the technique of heating the fusion plasma with high-energy neutral atoms in 1971, which became important in the PLT and in the TFTR project (Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor) proposed by Furth in 1973 and promoted at the PPPL, which began in 1983 was in operation until 1997 and was the most advanced fusion energy research project in the US to date. The first convincing proof of the feasibility of fusion energy was achieved in the 1990s on him and the European JET , which has been operating since 1983 .

Furth had been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1989 and of the National Academy of Sciences from 1976 . In 1974 he received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award , 1983 the Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics from the APS and in 1992 the Delmer S. Fahrney Medal from the Franklin Institute. He was on several advisory bodies, for example the Department of Energy (DOE), NASA , the US Department of Defense and the Max Planck Society . He was a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group , but left it prematurely.

Furth held more than 20 patents on fusion technology and metalworking with pulsed magnetic fields.

He was married and had a son.

Web links

• Obituary at the PPPL
• Biography on the website of the National Academy of Sciences

References

1. ↑ Furth, Rosenbluth, Killeen "Finite-resistivity instabilities of a sheet pinch", Physics Fluids Vol. 6, 1963, p.459, "Existence of mirror machines stable against interchange modes", Physical Review Letters, Vol. 11, 1965 / 6, p. 308
2. ↑ Furth, Galeev, Sagdeev, Rosenbluth “Plasma diffusion in a toroidal stellarator”, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 22, 1969, p. 511.
3. ^ Dawson, Furth, Tenney “Production of thermonuclear power by non-Maxwellian ions in a closed magnetic field configuration”, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 26, 1971, p. 1156.
4. ↑ In 1976 the construction was decided