John Bryan Taylor

John Bryan Taylor ( cited frequently JB Taylor, born 1928 in Birmingham ) is a British theoretical physicist who is concerned with plasma physics.

Taylor studied at the University of Birmingham, where in 1950 his bachelor's degree made ​​and received his doctorate in 1955. In between, he was from 1950 to 1952 in the Royal Air Force. In 1955 he was British nuclear weapons research center in Aldermaston. In 1962 he went to the Culham Laboratory, where he was chief scientist. He has been a visiting scientist at the University of California, Berkeley ( 1959-1960 ) and at the Institute for Advanced Study (1969, 1973 and 1980 /81).

He was also a professor ( Fondren Professor of Plasma Theory) at the University of Texas at Austin in 1989.

From Taylor comes the Relaxationstheorie the plasma, fundamental studies of two-dimensional plasmas and he was instrumental in the development of the " ballooning " transformation of toroidal plasmas. He discovered stable equilibrium states of the plasma in minimum - B magnetic fields and initiated the study of chaos in magnetic surfaces in plasmas ( Chirikov -Taylor standard map ). Furthermore, it comes from a fundamental study of the dynamo theory of the geomagnetic field.

In 1999 he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for basic research in areas such as Relaxationstheorie, transport, effects of finite Larmor radius, the minimum -B concept, adiabatic invariance, the standard figure, bootstrap currents, the ballooning representation, and scaling laws for plasma confinement.

In 1970 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1971 he was awarded the Maxwell Medal of the Institute of Physics. In 1979 he was awarded the Max Born Prize. He is a member of the American Physical Society and was awarded the 1986 Excellence in Plasma Physics Award. In 2004 he was awarded the Hannes Alfvén Prize - John William Connor and James Hastie, with whom he worked closely.