John Blewett
John Paul Blewett (born April 12, 1910 in Toronto , † April 7, 2000 in Chapel Hill , North Carolina ) was a Canadian physicist who worked on particle accelerators .
Life
Blewett studied mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto (master's degree in physics in 1933) and received his doctorate in 1936 from Princeton University . As a post-doc he spent a year in Cambridge at the Cavendish Laboratory with Ernest Rutherford and Mark Oliphant . From 1937 to 1946 he was in the research laboratories of General Electric in Schenectady ( New York ). At the Betatron from General Electric in 1947 he observed the energy loss (which led to the shrinking of the electron orbits) due to radiation losses on circular orbits and thus synchrotron radiation , but not directly. He had already calculated and predicted this in 1945, and was inspired by a related Russian work by Dmitri Ivanenko and Isaak Pomeranschuk . In 1947 he built the Cosmotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory , where he was responsible for the design of the magnets and the high-frequency technology. After its commissioning in 1952, he also advised the CERN physicists, who were planning a proton synchrotron with strong focussing, and for this purpose traveled to Odd Dahl in Bergen . From 1954 he was back at the BNL, where he set up the AG Synchrotron with Ken Green . In 1969 he succeeded him as head of accelerator development at the BNL and was then involved in the development of ISABELLE , a collider (the name comes from Blewett, ISA for Intersecting Storage Accelerator with the French word Belle for beautiful), which was discontinued in 1984 has been. In 1978 he retired from the BNL and then focused increasingly on synchrotron radiation sources. He was still working on the project planning for the National Synchrotron Light Source at the BNL, which went into operation in the 1980s. He also advised on a synchrotron radiation source in Taiwan. He died of pancreatitis.
Together with M. Stanley Livingston, he wrote a textbook on particle accelerators that has long been very popular.
In 1993 he received the Robert R. Wilson Prize . He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science .
He was the founder of Particle Accelerators magazine in 1970. His first wife, Hildred Blewett, was also a physicist who worked on accelerators. His second wife, Joan, was the assistant director of the History Center at the American Institute of Physics .
literature
- Andrew Sessler , Edmund Wilson: Engines of Discovery. A Century of Particle Accelerators. World Scientific, Singapore et al. 2007, ISBN 978-981-270070-4 .
- John P. Blewett, Milton S. Livingston : Particle Accelerators. McGraw Hill, New York NY et al. 1962.
Web links
- Obituary at the IEEE ( Memento from September 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- Obituary in the New York Times, Ernest Courant, and others
Remarks
- ↑ Donald Kerst built the first one there in 1941 and in 1945 a 100 MeV betatron was built, the record for particle accelerators at the time
- ↑ He had already demonstrated the strong focus of Ernest Courant , Stanley Livingston and Snyder on linear accelerators
- ↑ At this time, the Tevatron of Fermilab took over the leading role in the USA and the Superconducting Super Collider was being planned
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Blewett, John |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Blewett, John Paul (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Canadian physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 12, 1910 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Toronto |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 7, 2000 |
| Place of death | Chapel Hill , North Carolina |