Thomas H. Stix

Thomas Howard Stix ( born July 12, 1924 in St. Louis, Missouri, † April 16, 2001 in Princeton, New Jersey) was an American physicist who worked on plasma physics.

Stix studied at Caltech (Bachelor 1948). From 1942 to 1945 he was a radio operator of the U.S. Army in the Pacific War. In 1953 he received his doctorate at Princeton University, where he was a research assistant at the then still secret Project Matterhorn nuclear fusion afterwards. In 1956 he became Deputy Head of the experimental department and after its renaming in 1961 co-head of the experimental department of the Plasma Physics Laboratory ( PPPL ) in Princeton. This he remained until 1978, when he Associate Director of Academic Affairs was there.

From 1962 to 1996 he was professor of astrophysics at Princeton and 1981-1991 Deputy Head of the Department of Astrophysics. He led for many years, the plasma physics program at Princeton. Stix died in 2001 from leukemia.

He was several times at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and was also generally at Princeton University since the 1950s active in relations with Israel. When Project Matterhorn, he developed ways to heat with microwave plasmas in fusion reactors (eg, the Stix coil). He was a leading authority on plasma waves and examined chaotic motion of particles in plasmas with magnetic fields.

1962/63, he headed the Department of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society, the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics, he received in 1980. In 1969 he was Guggenheim Fellow. In 1999 he received the Distinguished Career Award from Fusion Power Associates. In 1991 he was awarded the University Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.

He was married in 1950 and had a daughter and a son.

Writings

• The theory of plasma waves, McGraw Hill 1962
• Waves in plasma, Springer 1992