Michel Carayol
Michel Charles Henri Carayol (born June 30, 1934 in Algiers , † February 23, 2003 in Paris ) was a French engineer who was one of the developers of the French hydrogen bomb .
Carayol, whose father was mayor of Kouba (a suburb of Algiers), visited the Lycée Bugeaud (called "Taupe arabe") in Algiers and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and studied from 1954 at the École Polytechnique and then at the École nationale de l'armement. In the early 1960s he worked for the military section (Direction des Applications Militaires, DAM) of the French Atomic Energy Agency ( CEA) on the development of the hydrogen bomb. The first French atomic bomb was tested in the Sahara (near Reggane) in 1960 and people now wanted to switch to the hydrogen bomb. The preliminary investigations by Pierre Billaud (Head of Experimental Physics at the CEA, he studied at the École Polytechnique from 1939) had shown that it was not enough to heat and compress the fusion fuel ( lithium deuteride ) with an atomic bomb. Eventually they came up with a design similar to Teller-Ulam (that is, compression via X-rays generated by the atomic bomb). In addition to Carayol, the applied mathematician Luc Dagens (* 1932), who also came from Algeria and had studied at the École Normale Supérieure, as well as Joseph Crozier and Bernard Lemaire, and (for the review) the British scientist William Richard Joseph Cook from British hydrogen bomb project. The numerical simulations of a spherical arrangement by Carayol (1967) were promising and on August 24, 1968 the first French hydrogen bomb was tested on the Fangataufa atoll (Canopus). It was ignited from a balloon at a height of 600 m and reached 2.7 megatons, followed in September by Procyon with 1.2 megatons.
In France, since the publication of Le Mal Francais (Plon 1976) by Alain Peyrefitte (former atomic minister), there has been controversy over the originators of the hydrogen bomb concept in France. Peyrefitte named Robert Dautray as the main developer, which was repeated in an article in Le Figaro in 1993 (and in the Dautray memoir in 2007), whereupon Bernard Lemaire (the then Scientific Director of the DAM) wrote an unpublished report (La Naissance du Thermonucleaire) in 1993, who named the real main developers: Billaud for the idea of cold compression of lithium deuteride before ignition, Michel Carayol for the Teller-Ulam design of compression using X-rays, Luc Dagens for the precise explanation of the fusion and breeding processes in lithium deuteride. Dautray came from the civilian side of the CEA and had only become scientific director of the hydrogen bomb project at the DAM from 1967 (as the successor to Jean Viard), when this was through politics (the Chinese detonated a hydrogen bomb on June 17, 1967 on the Lop Nur test site ) came under increasing pressure. De Gaulle had already visited the development center in Limeil in January 1966 and made it clear that results were finally being expected.
Carayol later dealt with military laser applications.
Carayol was in command of the Legion of Honor and the Ordre du Merité.
The temporary director of DAM Roger Baléras (* 1929), who initiated the high-power laser project there (inertial fusion with laser), also came from Algeria.
literature
- Roger Godement , Analysis II, Springer 1998, Appendix, Online
Web links
- René Mayer, Les pieds-noirs et la bombe H, L´Algérianiste no.120
- Billaud, The incredible history of the french H-bomb
Individual evidence
- ↑ Pierre Billaud et al., La bomb H, la verité
- ↑ Publication in the DAM bulletin was rejected. At that time Dautray was High Commissioner of the CEA
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Carayol, Michel |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Carayol, Michel Charles Henri (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French engineer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 30, 1934 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Algiers |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 23, 2003 |
| Place of death | Paris |