Paul Reardon

Paul Reardon (* 1930 ) is an American physicist who held leading positions in various particle accelerator experiments and fusion research, and was a pioneer for superconducting magnets for synchrotrons and tokamaks .

Reardon attended college in Boston with graduation in 1952, then was at the Johns Mannville Research Center of the US Army as a physicist and served as an artillery officer in the Korean War, for which he received the Bronze Star. He then did research again at the Johns Mannville Research Center, among other things, successfully on materials for brake shoes for trains and trucks in order to minimize squeaking. Then he went to Princeton University , where he first received further training and then became head of the magnet group at the Princeton-Penn accelerator. From 1964 he was in the research department of the Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC). From 1966 to 1969 he was project manager for the Bates 400 MeV linear accelerator for electrons at MIT. Afterwards he was at Fermilab at the invitation of Robert R. Wilson , where he headed the Booster Synchrotron and became head of the Accelerator Department and the Superconducting Energy Doubler Accelerator Department.

In 1975 he switched to fusion research. He became project manager of the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton and in 1982 Associate Director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory .

In 1983 he went to the Brookhaven National Laboratory , where he became head of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in 1984 , which he remained until 1988. Then he was project manager at the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the prestige project of high energy physics in the USA, whose development was stopped in 1993. Reardon then dealt with small proton accelerators for cancer therapy.

Not least because of his communicative and social skills, he was wanted as a project manager and also on many advisory and evaluation committees.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biography in Andrew Sessler, Edmund Wilson, Engines of Creation, World Scientific 2007, p. 66.
2. ↑ Sessler, Wilson, p. 66