Thomas H. Stix

Thomas Howard Stix (born July 12, 1924 in St. Louis , Missouri , † April 16, 2001 in Princeton , New Jersey ) was an American physicist who dealt with plasma physics.

Stix graduated from Caltech (Bachelor 1948). From 1942 to 1945 he was a radio operator in the US Army in the Pacific War . In 1953 he received his doctorate from Princeton University , where he was then research assistant at the then still secret Project Matterhorn on nuclear fusion . In 1956 he became deputy head of the experimental department and, after its renaming, from 1961 co-head of the experimental department of the Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in Princeton. He stayed that way until 1978, when he became Associate Director of Academic Affairs .

From 1962 to 1996 he was professor of astrophysics at Princeton and from 1981 to 1991 deputy head of the faculty of astrophysics. For many years he directed the plasma physics program at Princeton. Stix died of leukemia in 2001.

He has been to the Weizmann Institute in Israel on several occasions and has also been generally active in relations with Israel at Princeton University since the 1950s. In the Matterhorn project , he developed ways of heating plasmas in fusion reactors with microwaves (for example the Stix coil). He was a leading authority on plasma waves, studying chaotic motion of particles in plasmas using magnetic fields.

In 1962/63 he headed the plasma physics department of the American Physical Society , whose James Clerk Maxwell Prize for plasma physics he received in 1980. In 1969 he was a Guggenheim Fellow . In 1999 he received the Distinguished Career Award from Fusion Power Associates . In 1991 he received the University Award for Distinguished Teaching in Princeton.

He had been married since 1950 and had a daughter and a son.

Fonts (selection)

• The theory of plasma waves , McGraw Hill 1962,
• Waves in Plasmas , Springer 1992

Web links

• Literature by and about Thomas H. Stix in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Biography at the APS
• Princeton obituary