Norman Rostoker

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Norman Rostoker (born August 16, 1925 in Toronto , † December 25, 2014 in Irvine ) was a Canadian physicist who mainly dealt with plasma physics .

Rostoker studied at the University of Toronto , where he made his master's degree in physics in 1947 , and received his doctorate in 1950 from the Carnegie Institute of Technology , where he did research from 1948. From 1953 to 1956 he was at the Armor Research Foundation and from 1956 to 1967 at General Atomics in San Diego , from 1965 as a manager for fusion and plasma physics projects. He was also a professor at the University of California, San Diego from 1962 to 1965 . From 1967 he was IBM Professor of Engineering at Cornell University , where he was head of the Faculty of Applied Physics from 1967 to 1970. There he was one of the founders of the laboratory for pulsed electron and ion beams. From 1973 he was Professor of Physics at the University of California, Irvine , where he headed the Faculty of Physics from 1973 to 1976. Since 2007 he has been Professor Emeritus there.

First he dealt with explosives and shaped charges , tape theory and nuclear reactors and turned to plasma physics around 1958. Among other things, he dealt with the physics of high-intensity ion beams, non-linear plasma properties and high-density pinch -plasma confinement arrangements.

Rostoker pursued alternative concepts to civil nuclear fusion with particle accelerator technologies and the concepts of magnetized target fusion . In 1998 he was instrumental in founding the company Tri Alpha Energy in the Los Angeles area, which pursued the project of a colliding beam fusion reactor . Rays of protons and boron are converted into a plasma state that is held together by magnetic fields that are generated by the flow of particles in a cylindrical plasma itself ( field reverse configuration , FRC). Two such plasmas are then brought to collision at high speed and form a cigar-shaped configuration that is up to 3 m long and 40 cm wide. In the fusion plasma, the use of boron and protons does not produce high-energy neutrons as in the tokamak. According to Rostoker, neutral particles are then injected tangentially into the plasma cloud at high speed, the orbits follow the edge of the plasma and serve as a kind of protection against the cooling of the plasma by escaping particles. In 2015 they were able to announce the successful maintenance of a FRC plasma for five milliseconds. An intermediate step is the achievement of ten times higher plasma temperatures in the area of ​​the fusion of conventional deuterium-tritium plasmas (around degrees Celsius), which are fed in for this purpose, with the known associated problems (high-energy neutrons, need for tritium generation). The actual goal, however, is fusion based on boron and protons, which requires temperatures that are much higher than degrees Celsius. The required temperature is around thirty times higher and the energy yield per particle is only half as high as with deuterium-tritium fusion, but boron is often present and no high-energy neutrons are generated. After Rostoker's death at the end of 2014, Michl Binderbauer became CTO .

In 1988 he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics . In 1972 he was chairman of the plasma physics division of the American Physical Society (APS). In 1962 he became a Fellow of the APS.

literature

  • Gregory Benford, Toshiki Tajima: Norman Rostoker (Obituary) . In: Physics Today . tape 68 , no. 8 , 2015, p. 64 , doi : 10.1063 / PT.3.2891 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In Memory of Dr. Norman Rostoker, UIC, 2015 (PDF; 29 kB)
  2. ↑ Exclusive: Secretive fusion company claims reactor breakthrough , Science Online, August 24, 2015
  3. ↑ Norman Rostoker, Michl Binderbauer, Hendrik Monkhorst, Colliding Beam Fusion Reactor, Science, Volume 278, 1997, pp. 1419-1422
personal data
SURNAME Rostoker, Norman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian physicist
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Toronto
DATE OF DEATH December 25, 2014
Place of death Irvine