Nicholas Christofilos

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Nicholas Constantine Christofilos (Νικόλαος Χριστοφίλου) (born December 16, 1916 in Boston ; † September 24, 1972 ) was a Greek -American physicist.

Christofilos grew up in Greece , where his parents moved in 1922, graduated in electrical engineering and mechanical engineering from the Athens Polytechnic in 1938 and worked as an electrical engineer for an elevator company in Athens. During the German occupation the company repaired trucks, and Christofilos had time to devote himself to private physics studies using German textbooks on accelerator physics and nuclear physics . After the war he founded his own elevator company. In 1946 he independently invented the synchrotron and the strong focusing principle for accelerators, for which he applied for a patent in the USA and Greece. These ideas were rediscovered in 1952 by Ernest Courant , M. Stanley Livingston and Hartland Snyder and served as the basis for particle accelerators in the USA and at CERN . After publication by Courant and colleagues, a corresponding suggestion was found in a letter from Christofilos at the University of California, Berkeley , which went unnoticed. Courant and Livingston recognized its priority in a letter to Physical Review . An advance payment was agreed upon and in 1953 he was offered a position at Brookhaven National Laboratory .

In 1956 he joined the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), where he worked on a proposal for a nuclear fusion reactor called ASTRON (as part of the Sherwood project), which he had already developed in Greece in 1953. An electron beam heats the plasma that is trapped linearly between two outer mirror magnets and at the same time traps it through the magnetic field generated by the electrons. The electron accelerators ( "Induction Linear Accelerators" or "Induction Lineacs" ) required for this are used for X-ray flash photography of nuclear weapon simulation tests in Los Alamos. The ASTRON project ran from 1956 to 1973 at the LLNL.

At the LLNL he was also involved in or initiated a number of military projects, e.g. B. Operation Argus : high-altitude nuclear weapons explosions that trigger electromagnetic shocks and were intended to prevent or disrupt military communication - especially via satellites - and the electronic control of Soviet ICBMs . Corresponding atomic bomb tests were carried out from 1958 to 1962 (and triggered auroras in the Azores and in the Pacific, e.g. on the Samoa Islands and Hawaii ).

In the early 1960s, he proposed communication with strategic nuclear submarines over very long wavelengths (in the ELF range). This was to be tested in the Sanguine Project Antenna System , which was to extend over 22,500 square miles, i.e. more than 58,000 square kilometers, in Wisconsin and Michigan . Eventually it became the ELF project with over 145 miles (around 233 km) separate antenna systems in Wisconsin (Clam Lake) and Michigan (in Republic), which have to operate synchronously and generate electrical currents in the granite underground. The first successful tests took place in 1982.

Ideas from both projects were expanded in the 1980s by Bernard Eastlund , who was friends with Christofilos, to the HAARP project, in which artificial plasmas are generated in the ionosphere using electromagnetic heating, with applications such as: B. for communication with submarines.

Christofilos was a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group . In 1969 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

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Remarks

  1. ^ Patent of March 1950, "Focusing System for Ions and Electrons", US Patent No. 2,736,799. Otherwise he published nothing about it at the time.
personal data
SURNAME Christofilos, Nicholas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Christofilos, Nicholas Constantine (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek-American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 16, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston
DATE OF DEATH September 24, 1972