John Bryan Taylor

John Bryan Taylor (often quoted by JB Taylor ; * 1928 in Birmingham ) is a British theoretical physicist who deals with plasma physics.

Taylor studied at the University of Birmingham , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1950 and his PhD in 1955. Between 1950 and 1952 he was with the Royal Air Force . In 1955 he was British Nuclear Weapons Research Center in Aldermaston (headed by William Penney ), where he worked on the development of the hydrogen bomb. In 1962 he went to the Culham Laboratory, where he became chief scientist. Among other things, he was visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (1959 to 1960) and at the Institute for Advanced Study (1969, 1973 and 1980/81).

In 1989 he also became Professor ( Fondren Professor of Plasma Theory ) at the University of Texas at Austin .

Taylor wrote the relaxation theory of the plasma, fundamental studies of two-dimensional plasmas and he was significantly involved in the development of the "ballooning" transformation of toroidal plasmas. He discovered stable equilibrium states of the plasma in minimum B magnetic fields and initiated the investigation of chaos in magnetic surfaces in plasmas ( Tschirikow-Taylor standard illustration ). He also carried out a fundamental study of the dynamo theory of the earth's magnetic field.

In 1999 he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for fundamental research in areas such as relaxation theory, transport, effects of finite Larmor radius , the minimum B concept, adiabatic invariance, the standard mapping, bootstrap currents, the ballooning Representation and scaling laws for plasma confinement .

In 1970 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1971 he received the Maxwell Medal of the Institute of Physics . In 1979 he received the Max Born Prize . He is a member of the American Physical Society and received its Excellence in Plasma Physics Award in 1986. In 2004 he received the Hannes Alfvén Prize with John William Connor and James Hastie , with whom he worked closely.

Web links

• Biography on the occasion of the Maxwell Prize

Individual evidence

1. ^ Lorna Arnold , Britain and the H bomb, Palgrave Macmillan 2001
2. ↑ Laudation for the Maxwell Prize: for ground breaking research, distinguished by its ingenuity and clarity, in such topics as: relaxation theory, transport, finite Larmor radius effects, the minimum-B concept, adiabatic invariance, the standard map, bootstrap currents, the ballooning representation, and confinement scaling laws .