M. Stanley Livingston
Milton Stanley Livingston ( born May 25, 1905 in Broadhead, Wisconsin; † August 25, 1986 ) was an American physicist. He was a pioneer in the field of accelerator physics.
Life and work
Livingston first studied chemistry at Pomona College and then physics at Dartmouth College, where he received his master's degree. He was then a PhD student of Ernest Lawrence, for which he built in 1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, the prototype invented by Lawrence cyclotron. On January 9, 1932, they successfully tested a specimen with 10 inch diameter, the accelerated protons to 1.22 MeV. Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize for the development in 1939.
After four years in Berkeley, he went to Cornell University, where he (of 2 MeV ) outside of Berkeley built the first cyclotron ( with modest resources of $ 800 ). Was used for the cyclotron studies in experimental nuclear physics, where there was a collaboration with Hans Bethe and Robert Bacher at Cornell. They jointly published 1936/37, in Reviews of Modern Physics from which many physicists have learned several important articles on nuclear physics, the then new field. 1938 to 1940 he built another large cyclotron at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During the Second World War, he stayed with his cyclotron work. Now produced with the cyclotron and others radionuclides for medical purposes.
After the war, he participated in the " race " (especially with Lawrence Berkeley ) for the construction of the first major particle accelerator according to the synchrotron principle ( by Edwin McMillan introduced in Berkeley ) and was involved in the construction of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Officially, he was there still employed at MIT. May 1952 reached the built in Brookhaven cosmotron 's first accelerator the 1 GeV limit, soon increased to 3 GeV.
In 1952 he developed with the theorists Hartland Snyder and Ernest Courant in Brookhaven, the principle of strong focusing for synchrotrons, which was an important prerequisite for particle accelerators of ever higher energy ( independently of them, the concept had been discovered in 1949 by Nicholas Christofilos ). This synchrotrons came into focus that were planned simultaneously in Brookhaven, of Livingston in a Harvard -MIT collaboration at CERN and in the 30 - GeV range. The free exchange of ideas especially with the Europeans was then the AEC an eyesore. Finally sat down in the U.S. Courants design for Brookhaven by.
Starting in 1956, led Livingston to build the Cambridge Electron Accelerator ( CEA), an electron synchrotron to 6 GeV, which went into operation in 1962 and for some time was a leader before it was replaced by the SLAC. There was also an electron-positron storage ring. In 1967 Livingston was responsible for the construction of the Fermilab 200 GeV proton synchrotron (as co-director of Robert R. Wilson). In 1970, he retired and settled in Santa Fe.
In 1970 he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. In 1986, he received the Enrico Fermi Award. He also served as Honorary Doctor of the University of Hamburg ( 1967).