Rolf Wideröe

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rolf Wideröe (born July 11, 1902 in Oslo , Norway ; † October 11, 1996 in Nussbaumen , Switzerland ) was a Norwegian engineer and scientist . His outstanding achievements lay in the development of particle accelerators . He was the first to construct a linear accelerator operated with high-frequency AC voltage , as proposed by Gustav Ising . In addition, he developed the betatron , in which acceleration takes place according to the induction law via a time-varying magnetic field. He also came up with the idea of ​​the storage ring .

life and work

Wideröe was born in Oslo, where he graduated from high school in 1920 . In the same year he began studying electrical engineering at the TH Karlsruhe . As early as his fifth semester, he drew up his first plans for the betatron, which he called a radiation transformer . In 1924 he finished his studies as a graduate engineer . He briefly returned to Norway, where he worked in a locomotive workshop of the Norges Statsbaner and performed his 72-day military service. In June 1926, after the proposal was rejected in Karlsruhe, he began developing the betatron at RWTH Aachen University . Since the construction initially failed, he turned to the construction of a linear accelerator with drift tubes based on the suggestion of Gustav Ising , which became the subject of his dissertation . In 1928 he moved to Berlin and starts during his work at AEG , distance relay to develop. During this time he applied for numerous patents in Germany and the USA. Because of the threat of Hitler's seizure of power , he returned to Norway in late 1932.

In Norway he worked for N. Jacobsen's Electrical Workshop (NJEV), where he began producing the distance relays he had previously developed in Berlin. From June 1940 he worked for Norsk Elektrisk & Brown Boveri (NEBB). In 1941 he learned of Donald Kerst's development of the betatron (Physical Review article by Kerst 1941) and began to deal again with his old ideas. In 1943 he published a review article about it. His brother Viggo (born 1904), a pilot, was imprisoned in Rendsburg in 1942 as an "escape helper" and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Hints of a possibly shortened prison sentence for his brother were a reason for Wideröe to accept an offer from the German Air Force in 1943 to develop a betatron for the Reich Ministry of Aviation (RLM) in Hamburg . Luftwaffe officers visited him in Oslo in spring 1943 and shortly afterwards he visited Berlin; from August 1943 he was in Hamburg. In 1943/44 he submitted several patents in Germany, including those relating to betatron and various accelerator components such as magnetic lenses.

During his time in Hamburg at CHF Müller in Hamburg (which belonged to Philips), he submitted his patent for the storage ring in Germany. In the summer of 1944, its betatron with an energy of 15 MeV was put into operation for the first time in Hamburg  . A few months earlier, in April 1944, Konrad Gund had completed his 6 MeV Betatron in Erlangen. Widerröe worked with Bruno Touschek on this. The donor for the construction was the RLM, whose interest in such an accelerator was presumably to be able to use the x-rays generated as a " death ray " weapon at some point . However, Wideröe agreed with Werner Heisenberg that such a mission was no good. There were plans for a 200 MeV accelerator, but it was never realized.

After the end of the war, the betatron was brought to Great Britain , where it was put into operation in the Woolwich Arsenal for material investigations by Rudolf Kollath and probably scrapped after a few years. Wideröe himself was imprisoned in Norway from May to July 1945 on suspicion of collaboration. It has been suggested that he participated in the development of the V2 rocket. A commission of inquiry found, however, that this allegation was not tenable. For a long time he did not have a passport and was released from NEBB. During this time he developed the synchrotron theory and registered a patent for it in Norway.

In the spring of 1946, however, he was issued a temporary passport that enabled him to work at Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC) in Baden , Switzerland. From 1946 he began there with the construction of betatrons for medical purposes, of which 78 were produced by 1986. The first of these BBC betatrons was installed in the Zurich Cantonal Hospital , where it was used to irradiate cancer patients.

In May 1952, Wideroe was appointed advisor to the newly founded CERN . In 1956 his official consultancy ended, after which he only helped out occasionally. Although Wideroe had no further connections with CERN afterwards, he was invited to the congresses (1956 and 1959) via the large accelerators . In the winter of 1953 he held his inaugural lecture as a private lecturer at the ETH Zurich , where he was appointed adjunct professor in 1962 . From 1959 to 1963 he worked as a consultant for DESY .

Wideröe died in Nussbaumen (Aargau) at the age of 94.

Awards and memberships

literature

  • Rolf Wideröe, Pedro Waloschek : When the particles learned to walk: the life and work of the grandfather of the modern particle accelerator , Vieweg 1993, ISBN 978-3-663-01975-6 (English: The infancy of particle accelerators- life and work of Rolf Wideröe ) , new Rolf Wideröe 1902-1996 , Hamburg 2007.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Aashild Sørheim: Obsessed by a dream: the physicist Rolf Widerøe - a giant in the history of accelerators . Springer Open, Cham 2020, ISBN 978-3-030-26338-6 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-030-26338-6 , OCLC 1127566001 .
  2. ↑ Wideröe Der Strahlentransformator , Archiv für Elektrotechnik, Volume 37, 1943, p. 542. Submitted September 1942, doi : 10.5169 / seals-322448
  3. ^ Sessler, Wilson Engines of Creation , World Scientific 2007, p. 51.
  4. ↑ Rolf Wideröe, Pedro Waloschek: When the particles learned to walk: the life and work of the grandfather of the modern particle accelerator - Rolf Wideröe . Vierweg, 1993, ISBN 3-528-06567-2 ( cern.ch ).
  5. ↑ Anniversary brochure - Publication de jubilé - Anniversary publication 1964 - 2014, Swiss Society for Radiation Biology and Medical Physics (SGSMP, SSRMP, SSRFM), October 2014, ISBN 3 908 125 55 3
personal data
SURNAME Wideröe, Rolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian engineer and scientist
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Oslo , Norway
DATE OF DEATH October 11, 1996
Place of death Nussbaumen , Switzerland