Hartland Snyder

Hartland Sweet Snyder (* 1913 in Salt Lake City, † 1962) was an American physicist.

Snyder was a PhD student of Robert Oppenheimer in Berkeley, with whom he developed in 1939 an early description of the gravitational collapse to black holes in general relativity theory. The term black hole was indeed coined by John Archibald Wheeler in 1967, but is already contained in the work of Oppenheimer, Snyder in 1939. Literally, they write in the summary of their work, that there is enough heavy stars collapse after the exhaustion of their fusion energy resources, and that this collapse lasting indefinitely.

Snyder developed with M. Stanley Livingston and Ernest Courant 1952, the strong focusing principle for synchrotrons, which made it possible to hold the particle and was an important prerequisite for particle accelerators of ever higher energy. Regardless of them, the concept was discovered in 1949 by Nicholas Christofilos.

1940 to 1947 he was at Northwestern University and from 1947 to his death in 1962 at Brookhaven National Laboratory.