Harold Furth

Paul Harold Furth ( born January 13, 1930 in Vienna, † 21 February 2002 in Philadelphia ) was an American physicist who was a leader in fusion research and plasma physics in the United States.

Life and work

Furth attended the International School of Geneva, and came in 1941 with his parents to the United States. He studied at Harvard University ( Master's degree in 1956 ) and a year at Cornell University. In 1960 he received his doctorate at Harvard. Then worked from 1956 to 1967 on fusion research project at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (then Lawrence Radiation Laboratory ). In 1967 he joined the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory ( PPPL ) and became a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University. 1967 to 1978 he was one of the leaders of the experimental department at PPPL, 1978, he was associate director and director of research, program director in 1980 and from 1981 to 1990 director of the laboratory. He resigned for health reasons back eventually. In 1999, he retired as a professor, but remained in the research at PPPL active until his death.

In the 1960s, he developed important theories on plasma instabilities in nuclear fusion reactor experiments, which showed, for example, in the pinch experiments which he carried out with Stirling Colgate at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. In 1963 he published with Marshall Rosenbluth and John Killeen a theory of resistive ( triggered by the line resistance in plasma) instabilities in magnetically confined plasmas. 1965/66, it came at an international workshop in Trieste also to a fruitful cooperation with the leading Russian plasma physicists Roald Sagdeev and Galeev Alexander. Together they developed with Rosenbluth a transport theory of complex trajectories of particles in the tokamak. After the announcement of record high temperatures of 10 million degrees Celsius on the Russian tokamak T-3 in 1968, he initiated his own tokamak projects, which confirmed the results of Soviet scientists in 1970 in Princeton. The PLT ( Princeton Large Torus) reached in 1978 even temperatures of 60 million degrees Celsius. With Fred Tenney and John Dawson, he developed in 1971, the technique of heating the fusion plasma with high-energy neutral atoms, which was at PPPL important in PLT and in 1973 proposed by Furth and promoted by him TFTR project ( Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor ), which by 1983 to 1997 was in operation and remains so today most advanced fusion energy research project in the U.S. was. To him and the 1983 operating European JET succeeded in the 1990s, the first convincing evidence of the feasibility of fusion energy.

Furth was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1976 at the National Academy of Sciences. In 1974 he received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, the 1983 Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics of the APS and Delmer S. Fahrney Medal 1992 of the Franklin Institute. He was in several advisory bodies, for example, the Department of Energy (DOE ), NASA, the Department of Defense of the USA and the Max Planck Society. He was a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group, but they left early.

Furth held more than 20 patents on fusion engineering and metalworking pulsed magnetic fields.

He was married and had a son.