Tihiro Ohkawa

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tihiro Ohkawa ( Japanese 大河 千 弘 , Ōkawa Chihiro ; * 1928 in Kanazawa ; † September 27, 2014 in La Jolla , California ) was a Japanese physicist who studied plasma physics and particle accelerators .

Ohkawa studied physics at Tokyo University , where he also received his doctorate. During the Second World War he was (at the age of 16) a member of Yoshio Nishina's group for research into cosmic radiation. He was a researcher at CERN and Midwestern State University (or MURA) before becoming a professor at the University of Tokyo. In 1960 he went to General Atomics , where he led a fusion research project and became vice president and later vice chairman of the board. In 1994 he left General Atomics to found TOYO Technologies, of which he is president. In 2004 he co-founded Nano Fusion Technologies with Masano Nishikawa for the development of microfluidics (like small electroosmotic pumps). He was also a physics professor at the University of California, San Diego .

In 1955 he developed the Fixed Field Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (FFAG) independently of Keith Symon , the prototype of which was developed in 1956 by the Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA).

In 1960, Ohkawa and Donald Kerst proposed a method to stabilize instabilities in tokamaks by generating multipole fields, which was confirmed by experiments. In 1968 he suggested generating the multipole fields by plasma currents himself, from which the Plasma Current Multipole Configuration (PCM) and the doublet series arose, which showed the advantages of optimizing the tokamak plasma cross-section. The D-III-D experiment by General Atomics, which also influenced the ITER concept, arose from the doublet concept .

He was also involved in the application of plasma physics to the separation of radioactive isotopes from nuclear waste (at the Archimedes Technology Group in San Diego , which he co-founded).

Ohkawa held over 50 patents, for example in particle accelerators, fusion technology and biotechnology.

In 1968 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1979 he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics . In 1984 he received the Fusion Power Associates Leader Award.

literature

  • Andrew Sessler, Edmund Wilson Engines of Discovery , World Scientific 2007, p. 25

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary from Physics Today , doi: 10.1063 / PT.5.6106
  2. ↑ Kerst, Ohkawa, Physical Review Letters, Volume 7, 1961, p. 41
  3. ↑ Ohkawa, Yoshikawa, Kribel, Schupp, Jensen Physical Review Letters, Volume 24, 1970, p 95
  4. ^ Ohkawa, Voorhies Physical Review Letters, Volume 22, 1969, p. 1275
  5. ^ Dale Meade 50 years of fusion research , Nuclear Fusion, Volume 50, 2010, 014004
  6. ↑ General Atomics website for D III D
  7. ↑ Cluggish, Ohkawa, Agnew, Freeman, Miller, Putvinski, Sevier, Umstadter Separation of radionuclides from nuclear waste by a plasma mass filter , IEEE Conference on Pulsed Power Plasma Science, Las Vegas 2001, abstract
  8. ↑ Biography at Fusion Power Associates, FPA
personal data
SURNAME Ohkawa, Tihiro
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 大河 千 弘 (Japanese); Ōkawa, Chihiro
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese physicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Kanazawa
DATE OF DEATH September 27, 2014
Place of death La Jolla , California