Hugh Montgomery

Westfall:

Okay. For the tape recorder, this is Catherine Westfall. It is February 17, 2016. I’m with Hugh Montgomery, and we are at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Newport News, Virginia. Okay. I always have a question for scientists in important decision-making positions: how did you get your start. How did you get into this business? How did you get interested in physics? What did you study? With whom? And then we can discuss the path of how you came to the US.

Montgomery:

Okay. So there are some pieces of this that are, if you like, a little too ideal from the point of view of how people typically are inspired to do physics. But then there are other aspects that are a little unusual, I think. I was educated in a high school—grammar school, as we call them in England—with only 120 students from age 11 to 18. So there were 16 of us in the first year class at age 11 (5 boys, 11 girls). Then in the final two years in England’s high school system we concentrated on typically three subjects. The choice depended somewhat on the teachers, but also our own interests, and so I was the only person in my year who chose to do physics. My physics teacher was a special person, and he told me: “You know how to read, I’m not going to read to you. You can read the books and then when you do the problems, if you get into difficulties, then we can discuss.” It was at the time when England was going through a reformation, if you wish, of science education, and it was somehow called the Nuffield Programme.

Westfall:

Excuse me, Mont. Where in England are we talking about? Where did you grow up?

Montgomery:

Sorry. I grew up in Wensleydale, which is one of the five or six dales which carry the rivers which flow from the center of the Pennines, the top of the Pennines, to the east and eventually come together to form the Ouse, which flows out into the North Sea as the Humber Estuary at Hull. The society, because of older times, developed linearly, so I went to a high school to which I traveled 14 miles along the valley. The catchment area was a total of 40 miles long, 20 miles either side of the school, but in the lateral dimension, it was only about eight miles. That’s the width of the valley. The roads over the tops from one valley to the other were less traveled. This small school was created by the side of the river. The river is the River Ure. Its older name was Yore, and the name of the school was Yorebridge Grammar School (so bridge over the Yore).

So getting back to my teacher, in the Nuffield Science Project, we received a number of pieces of equipment, and some of the equipment was produced by Leybold, a German company. The instructions were in German, or anyway, not in clear English. It was like Christmas every day! We’d open the box and we’d try and make the experiment work. There were some beautiful experiments. I got to measure the ratio of the electron charge to the electron mass by having an electron beam in a tube with gas in it. The electron beam was guided by the field from two Helmholtz coils and we measured the radius of the circle and all. We measured e/m. We also tried Millikan’s experiment, and Millikan’s experiment is bedeviled by the fact that the oil that you would drop and try and measure how it behaved under voltage would clog the hole through which the oil came. But these were all, if you like, fantastic learning experiences, and my teacher encouraged me to be in the lab as much as I wanted to be. I think he used me as an example to the younger kids in the actual class he was teaching. You know, “Hey, look. There’s a guy there who’s interested in physics.”

But in fact, the other thing, the classic piece was that the library had a small selection of Scientific American reprints, and I think that my interest in the physics we do at Jefferson Lab traces back to reading in Scientific American about the two neutrino experiment done by Lederman and Schwartz and Steinberger. So that’s very classical. The way the interaction with the teacher went I think was a little different.

So then I went to Manchester as an undergraduate. Some of the decision to go there came because I was already a supporter since many years of Manchester United Football Club. But it was also the school that my teacher had gone to, and thus there were connections. So I was an undergraduate there. I just made it into first class degree category. There were five of us that year. The total numbers may be a little high for American thinking. We had 150 physics majors, physics and physics and electronics majors, when we started. This was 1966. So out of the 100 or so that got honors degrees in physics at the end of the three years, there were five of us who were classed as first class. It’s also a little amusing. The passing grade in the English system was about 45% based only on the end-of-year exams. So it was sometimes a little strange to see my kids getting 90% on exams, it was a little unreal.

So I completed my undergraduate career. I looked at a couple of different schools for graduate work. Westfield College in London I had a look at, and also I had a look at Durham. In the end, I held out for Manchester, and again, they go down the class list. They had a couple of external offers out. They had places in the high energy group for maybe three students, I believe, and some in the nuclear physics group. There were two external offers already out in the high energy groups and a colleague who was higher than me in the class who wanted to do particle physics, so that was the three taken up, as it were. So they offered me one classified as nuclear physics and I accepted it.

A little later, the secretary of the department, who had the students’ welfare in mind, pointed out to me that at this stage, I had the grant personally and that if I decided I wanted to do particle physics rather than nuclear physics, I could. So in fact, I talked with the particle physics professor and he took me to Daresbury Nuclear Physics Lab, which was a 4 GeV electron accelerator between Manchester and Liverpool. There are apocryphal stories about how he poured liberal amounts of beer into me and that’s why I finished up with particle physics. In fact, I saw him in November (2015) and we had this conversation.

A visit to the lab came up a couple of weeks ago because we had a workshop here on K-zero-long physics, and I recall him taking me into the experiment. The rates in the actual experiment were so low that we could walk in between the chambers. He pointed to the flashes in the spark chambers and said, “Look. A K-zero decayed inside you, and those are the two pions that came out.” So I actually didn’t do the K-zero work. I joined the group which did electron scattering. And this is kind of relevant for where we finish up here at Jefferson Lab -- I worked on an experiment doing electron scattering—so an electron onto a hydrogen target with a proton and an electron coming off. We measured the rudiments of the distributions at the first resonance, which we do exquisitely at Jefferson Lab. My thesis was the production of [pi] and [Delta plus plus]. That’s a little higher energy than the first resonance, just into threshold for that process. In principle, although the kinematic range was not sufficiently extensive, but, in principle, you can get access to the pion form factor and to the [Delta plus plus] form factor and also an axial form factor which is related to the weak interaction. So it had a lot of the physics characteristics of the kind of work that’s being done here at Jefferson Lab.

In fact, when I decided to come to Jefferson Lab a long time later, Helen Edwards, who is rather famous as an accelerator physicist and also a member of our JSA board of directors said, “Oh, so you’re going back to the form factors, Mont.” [Chuckles] So yeah. I actually spent approximately 21 years scattering charged leptons, either electrons or muons. So if I pause, that’s my career in England.

I worked as a post-doc following my Ph.D. for a couple of years in another group at Daresbury which did similar physics but not quite the same. The group had the major benefit that it had a 50% Italian component, and in particular, there was a strong group from Pisa. So the eventual chair of the department at Pisa, Lello Stefanini, was a member of the group. Adalberto Giazotto, who finished up being spokesman for the Virgo experiment, which is in the news right now, was another of the members of the Italian piece. Marcello Giorgi, who finished up as the spokesman at the BaBar group at SLAC, was also on the experiment. So we had a group of people who actually ended up being fairly prominent in the field.

But I then got the opportunity to join a group which had components from Lancaster and from Manchester. So we had two of us at Daresbury bringing Daresbury as well, working along with a Dutch group from Utrecht at the CERN Intersecting Storage Rings. The group leader was Hans Sens. As an aside, there’s a famous picture of one of the early g-2 experiments at CERN which had Lederman as one of the leaders. It had Nino Zichichi. It had Hans Sens and Marcel Vivargent (that translates to quicksilver). If you were to classify them a little jocularly, they were all rogues in their own way.

Westfall:

Interesting.

Montgomery:

An interesting edge, yes. Okay. So I went and worked on the ISR. We had two small-angle spectrometers which we constructed. So I had started my career as a post-graduate in ‘69. That was the year after the discovery of the observation of the large cross section in the SLAC experiments, which was later identified as the identification of quarks.

Westfall:

The Kendall—

Montgomery:

SLAC. Kendall, Friedman, and Taylor.

Westfall:

Gotcha. Okay.

Montgomery:

Then when I moved to CERN, it was January 1975, and in November 1974 there had been the observation of the J/Psi. So everybody and his brother was looking for evidence of the production of charm. So in I2 at the ISR, there was a small-angle spectrometer and a wide-angle spectrometer, completely independent experiments, and we decided that we would try and run them together and look for one particle in one spectrometer and another particle in the other spectrometer. We were able to identify pions, kaons, and protons in the small-angle spectrometer, and the wide-angle spectrometer they could do the same but with both signs of electric charge. So we had all the different two-particle mass combinations that you could imagine. So we set up to run the experiment with a common trigger, but we had the data acquisitions running independently so that the wide-angle spectrometer data was written onto one tape and the small-angle spectrometer onto another tape. The wide-angle spectrometer had a Rutherford Lab component in it, and so those tapes were sent off to the Rutherford Lab for reconstruction while we did the small-angle reconstruction at CERN. So we had the issue of how were we going to put the data back together again? How were we going to identify this event—this spectrometer with this event and this spectrometer. So intelligently, we put a clock in place which was read out, a precision clock, a digital clock if you wish, which was read out by both experiments, and so we could identify events.

However, there’s always fun with malfunction. So not all of the events are reconstructible. You have a certain efficiency, and so some events came back from the Rutherford and some were reconstructed. So we would go to scan the tapes to put the events together, but it turned out that the clock didn’t always go forward. So one of my colleagues, Norman McCubbin, had to work out the algorithm that he was going to use to move the tape forward or backward because when you are moving a tape, it takes a certain time going forward, but it takes a different time when it’s rewound. So this was a tricky logistical problem that he solved.

In the end, the results of the experimental search were negative. We had a beautiful distribution that demonstrated the chi-square distribution for a single degree of freedom. We had the right number of events. We reconstructed each one of them individually, and reconstructed means that we read off the coordinates and drew them on a piece of paper. I tell that to the students these days and their minds are boggled because in those days we didn’t do much by way of computer graphics.

So I worked on that experiment. Already I was working on the European Muon Collaboration experiment. I did my first simulation for that experiment in January of 1973, and so after running for two or three years on the ISR, I made the transition into working more or less full time on the muon scattering experiment. In 1978, I interviewed for and was given a CERN staff position. That’s a three plus three year position.

Amusingly, of the two interviewers that I remember, one was Emilio Picasso who was the division leader, and the other was with a theoretician called Armenteros. He was Spanish, but he had spent time in Manchester. There are two soccer clubs in Manchester, and so as we got to the end of the interview, he asked me which team I supported and I said, “United.” So immediately Picasso said, “Oh, very sorry. That’s…”

Westfall:

“That is not my team!” [Laughs]

Montgomery:

That’s the end of the interview, yeah. But it turned out well.

Westfall:

Was he teasing?

Montgomery:

He was teasing, yes. Yes, he was teasing.

Westfall:

One thing quickly. So you lived in Geneva, then, when you took this three-year staff position—

Montgomery:

Before that. In fact, I moved there in January ‘75 as a post-doc paid by England and they provided housing.

Westfall:

Okay. Was there any kind of feeling that you had that you were leaving…that you were emigrating, at least temporarily?

Montgomery:

So there were two phases to that. The very first phase was that, if I recall correctly, with my salary we were barely above water as a post-doc in England. If I remember correctly, my starting salary was £1800 per year. On the other hand, my wife and I had already a child during ‘74, and when we moved to Geneva, the stipulation for my wife was that it’s for one year and one year only.

Westfall:

Famous last words. [Laughter]

Montgomery:

As it turns out, we’ve never been back, and right now I couldn’t persuade my wife to go back to England. So in Geneva, the family integrated pretty well. My older son, who was quite young, he and his mother met another boy and his mother and they became friends. Then he went to the local kindergarten, and by the time he was seven or eight, he would mimic my abominable French accent.

Westfall:

[Laughs] So you were living on the French side?

Montgomery:

No, the Swiss. His accent was a little Vaudois because his friend was Vaudois, but he certainly integrated into the French-speaking system in Geneva. So we were quite well settled in Geneva. We left in ‘83. The system at CERN at the time was—how can I put it?—fairly difficult for a young physicist. There was one physics position per year. As a staff member, you were considered maybe once during your possible six years on the staff, and the lab reserved the right to hire that one person from anywhere in the world. What I recall is that Bernard Pope was thought to be a leading candidate, but they decided to reach out and bring in the eminent Bill Willis from Brookhaven or Columbia; I forget where he was at the time. So there was a strong competition for this one place, and you weren’t told you were a candidate.

Westfall:

Yeah, Bernard’s at MSU, so he’s somebody I know. [Chuckles]

Montgomery:

He would confirm the story maybe. So it turned out that I only knew I was being considered because there was a secretary who was a little indiscreet who mentioned to me that she’d seen in her boss’s documents that I was on a list, and then a little later that I was on a shorter list. Then she stopped talking about it and eventually in June, I received a letter from Professor Schopper hoping that I’d find employment elsewhere.

Westfall:

Yeah, he was Director General at that point, Herwig Schopper.

Montgomery:

Schopper was Director General. That was with maybe, I think, a year of the contract left, so you start looking for positions. I should say that at that time I was spokesman of the EMC experiment, so it wasn’t as though I’d somehow frittered away my efforts. There are some stories that I could tell you about the EMC experiment. I’m not sure now is the right time; maybe we could loop back if you think it appropriate.

So we’re on the progression to how did I finish up in the United States. I went fishing and I was working with a number of groups in Europe. A competitor group had approached me to see whether I would be interested in going to Saclay. At the time I was still thinking CERN. When I became available, a group from DESY approached me, and in fact I interviewed there. Paul Söding was the research director, and at the time, Bjorn Wiik was recruiting people for the future HERA collider. Bjorn was extremely keen to get me, and so DESY made an offer and Paul Söding said, “You know you don’t have to go work for Bjorn. The offer is for you to do what you would like to do.” So that would have been a permanent position, albeit in the German system, where when you asked how much your salary was, then they calculated down to the nearest half pfennig, including church tax. [Laughs] So at the same time, I was also a candidate to Berkeley for an assistant professorship.

Westfall:

This is LBL or UC Berkeley?

Montgomery:

That was UC Berkeley. But of course, when UC Berkeley talks to you, they point out that up the hill, we have all these beautiful facilities. So I think I finished second for that job, and also I talked with Fermilab and Fermilab offered me a position as well. We eventually took the decision to move to Fermilab. Fermilab at the time rarely offered a permanent position to an external candidate. Bjorken might have been the exception. So I joined Fermilab as an associate scientist.

Westfall:

So what year is this?

Montgomery:

This was 1983. November 3, 1983.

Westfall:

So Leon Lederman is the director.

Montgomery:

Lederman is the director, yeah. Yes.

Westfall:

And so who would you work with? Were you in the physics…?

Montgomery:

So I was recruited into Research Services Department in the Research Division. At the time when I was recruited, Brad Cox was the department head. By the time I got there, he was no longer head of the department. [Chuckles] A guy called Frank Beck was the department head. He was a visitor from CERN, in fact. Within a very short time, I was made associate head of the department, and then as time progressed, a year later Research Division was reorganized. One of the technicians said to me, “Research Services is going out of existence.” I said, “What?” I thought I should maybe know what was happening, being associate department head. But in fact, it turned out he was absolutely correct, and Ken Stanfield did a reorganization of Research Division when he took over as head in October ‘84. Peter Koehler had been the division head when I was recruited, but Ken took over in October of ’84. He doesn’t like me telling this story, but he said, “We’re thinking of considering you for a permanent position. How would you like to be head of computing?” So of course! What do you say in that situation? I said yes, so I became head of the Computing Department in the Research Division.

Westfall:

Just one thing. You had already relocated your young family to Geneva. Then you said you took the decision to move them to Illinois.

Montgomery:

Yes, and by then there was an extra boy as well. He was born in Geneva.

Westfall:

Oh, right. Your growing family, right. It is in the greater Chicago area, but Batavia isn’t exactly Geneva. So how did you feel about it? How did you feel about coming to the US?

Montgomery:

In retrospect, I’ve often wondered how I felt. I’m not sure whether this is how I thought about it, but if you recall, I said that I did my degree, the Ph.D., with a group from Manchester where I’d been an undergraduate. And then for my post-doc job I moved a little bit. I moved to Daresbury and did a post-doc on a different experiment. So I like to think that each of these steps meant something. Okay, so you were able to do your Ph.D., but that was probably because of all your friends helping you. You should try a little broader. Then, of course, moving to Geneva; that was outside of Daresbury, and so a bigger arena. Then you could think that moving to the States was then, if you like, the ultimate big step.

But also, the sociology is such that there are only a few thousand particle physicists, nuclear physicists in the world, and so when I walked into the cafeteria at Fermilab to visit to interview, then I knew people in the cafeteria. So I anticipated the transition for me would be very easy, but for the family it might be more difficult. As it turned out, the job at Fermilab was a bit of a surprise. They often used to say at Fermilab, “The organization chart is only a suggestion,” and indeed, because the ethos had been to move people around, there were lots of connections which you just couldn’t see at all from an organization chart. So unless you knew about those connections, it turned out to be quite difficult to get things done, and I was lost because the European system actually used to have an organization chart in which you could more or less follow.

Westfall:

That was defined! [Laughs] By the way, this isn’t American versus European. This is Fermilab. Maybe you’re aware of that.

Montgomery:

Maybe.

Westfall:

LBL really had an organization chart, for example, but anyway, I interrupt. But the family did well.

Montgomery:

So indeed, the family, it turned out, again adapted very well. I don’t know. Credit to my wife, I think. The kids, you know, take a few months to assimilate.

Westfall:

Had they been speaking English at all?

Montgomery:

The older one was fluent in French at school and with his friends, and at home we mainly spoke English, except when joking around and when visitors who only spoke French were there. The younger one was born in ‘77, so he was five or six when we moved. He was not really sure which language he should be speaking.

Westfall:

So he was between the two stools.

Montgomery:

That’s right, almost. He, within a few weeks in the States, completely condensed into the English state. The other one has maintained his French still.

Westfall:

Oh, fabulous!

Montgomery:

To the extent that a few years ago, for the company he works with, they asked him to go and live in Europe in Toulouse. He’s in the aircraft industry, so he went. Toulouse is where Airbus does its assembly work, and so he was part of the American company trying to increase the business that they were doing in Europe. So he went with his family to Toulouse, and he operated completely in French for all his work.

Westfall:

Wow.

Montgomery:

So that worked out rather well. I liked that situation.

Westfall:

Do you have any American-born children?

Montgomery:

No, I’ve just got those two. In fact, there are funny stories all the way around. The eldest son is still only English. When he moved to France for a couple of years, then he had absolutely no problems, of course, because he had a European passport, put the kids into a French school, and then after six months he realized that his wife was there illegally. [Laughter] But the French have their idiosyncrasies, and when they went to the local officials to discuss the situation, they said, “I’ll keep quiet. Just get your passport stamped when you come into the country and everything will be fine.” [Laughter] I don’t know whether we’re on a topic which is interesting to you.

Westfall:

Oh, yeah. But I should explain that one of the things that I’m always fascinated with is the internationality of physics, and I’m particularly interested in the fact that this laboratory has had three directors and none of them American-born. I had very interesting discussions with Hermann Grunder back when he was director, and he came to this lab via Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Montgomery:

Right, as did Christoph Leemann.

Westfall:

So as time goes on, I’m just interested in these issues of assimilation, and particularly interested, to give you a heads up of what my particular interest is, in what difference does it make that you…I remember talking with a German physicist who then went to LBL and then went back to GSI, actually, and I remember him saying that it was a bit of a problem for him because he did physics with an American accent. [Laughs] So I’m particularly interested in how it influences you and the way you think about physics on the one hand, and the way that you think about how a lab can or should run on the other hand. So part of it is internationally, but then the other part of it is the influence of specific lab cultures, if you will, because I see Fermilab, for example, as being a very distinctive lab culture.

Montgomery:

Well, as you know, I had 25 years at Fermilab in the end, and Fermilab certainly influenced me quite a lot. Of course, nine to ten years in Geneva in CERN also was a big influence. The European muon experiment especially was large. We had 140 physicists when I was spokesman. The only comparable experiment in size was UA1, the collider experiment, and it was definitely multi-national. We had Italian, French, German, and English. I remember that once in my office with a Serbo-Croatian who was employed in Holland, and he had four or five phone calls in succession and it was a different language he used with each phone call. So you get a certain perspective on the ability of people to work in different languages. I’m inordinately proud of the fact that I once gave a seminar at Saclay in French and that on several occasions when I’ve been invited to meetings in France or thesis defenses, for example, that I’ve been treated as somebody who speaks French.

Westfall:

Which is not trivial with the French.

Montgomery:

Right. Yes, but the French also love their own language, and so they are nearly as chauvinistic about language as are the Brits, for example. So yeah, I have other stories. The reasons that my sons were naturalized, or not—one already became American several years ago. He made that choice because he thought he was going to go to medical school and he thought he’d read somewhere that to get into medical school, it was easier if you were a US citizen. The older son stayed British because he was a track and field athlete who felt that the depth in the steeplechase in England was less than the depth in the United States and he had a better chance of actually becoming an international. He didn’t quite make it, but my youngest son finished up rowing for the United States at world championships. So that was amusing.

Westfall:

Okay. So he stayed British, but are you and your wife naturalized?

Montgomery:

So my wife became naturalized to teach in Illinois. She went back to school to get sufficient American credits to teach. When you start teaching in Illinois, you sign a piece of paper that says that you intend to become a US citizen. So she followed through with that, and from the early ‘90s she’s been a US citizen. I finally became a US citizen, I think, two years ago in March. The situation there is also interesting. There are a number of British physicists who don’t immediately become American citizens, and so David Leith at SLAC took quite a long time. He was close to retirement before he took that step. But I talked to Mike Harrison, who used to be a colleague at Fermilab but has been at Brookhaven for many years, and he explained that if you’re not a US citizen and you die, then your spouse pays more taxes than if you were a US citizen. For many years my attitude was, well, that doesn’t concern me, right? [Laughs]

Westfall:

I’m not going to die.

Montgomery:

No. I will be dead, and so…[Laughs] So anyway, two years ago we decided, or I decided that I was okay with the idea, and my wife got a lawyer to put the story together. One of the features of applying for US citizenship is that you’re supposed to write down every instance of international travel outside of the United States since you got your Green Card.

Westfall:

Oh my goodness.

Montgomery:

So in 25 years, that’s…

Westfall:

A little bit of travel.

Montgomery:

A little bit of travel, and not all of it was under the Lab auspices. So we reached out to Fermilab for some information and dredged my memory for some other. Then the advantage of the lawyer was that he had no guilt about not being able to remember anything, so he could just say, “To the best of our knowledge, x,” and then, even if it were imperfect, you could move forward.

With respect specifically to the three lab directors here, I’ve used that ploy with high school science bowls and most recently with the Conference Undergraduate Women in Physics, which we shared with Old Dominion University. I point out that I’m the third Jefferson Lab director. I’m the third white head, male, European to be lab director here. What’s wrong with that picture? And what are you going to do about it? Who is it that’s going to fix that? Of course, it’s certainly not the picture of America, but in fact it’s a little bit the picture of American science. I don’t know what the fraction is, but if I look around at the physicists in this lab, in other labs, the number that didn’t start their lives in this country is very, very big. I don’t know. Did you ever work what fraction that is, Catherine?

Westfall:

No, certainly I did not. It’s just interesting to me that if I think about Fermilab directors, they’re all American-born. So I think somehow it’s not quite coincidental because I think Christoph got to be director because he was the right hand man of Hermann and they went back to LBL together and they’re both Swiss, so you know.

Montgomery:

Well, you said Fermilab was all American. That’s not actually true because Pier Oddone was South American.

Westfall:

Right. Later. I take that back. But the first three were all… [Laughs]

Montgomery:

The first three, that’s right.

Westfall:

And then I get fuzzy about who was…

Montgomery:

Right, and if you look at SLAC, then Jonathan Dorfan was South African.

Westfall:

And Pief.

Montgomery:

Pief was… I don’t know. Yeah, Pief Panofsky came, I think, to the United States in the ‘30s.

Westfall:

But I’m particularly interested in your sense of the fact that you did not naturalize. I understand the reasons why you eventually naturalized. I have a lot of friends who eventually naturalize for practical reasons. But if there was any sense that you retained after all that at that time a British identity, or if there was any sense that you were making a conscious attempt not to embrace an American identity, or if it was more just that you didn’t see what difference did it make, that you saw yourself as somehow being internationalized.

Montgomery:

So there is a record which I don’t want to discuss the details of in which when asked about my affiliations, the response basically was citizen of the world. Now that’s a little high ambition rather than actuality, but I’m fairly neutral politically.

Westfall:

So voting wasn’t a big issue for you.

Montgomery:

In England, if you’re not resident in England, unless you are either in the armed forces or in the diplomatic service or associated with a consulate, then you can’t vote because you only vote in your constituency and if you don’t have an address, you don’t have a constituency. So I’ve not voted since the elections in 1974.

Westfall:

Interesting.

Montgomery:

So naively, I used to say, “I’m not responsible for anybody. Thatcher isn’t my fault.”

Westfall:

[Laughs] And neither are any American presidents, either!

Montgomery:

That’s exactly right. You know, since Reagan was president when I came in, I thought, “This is a little bizarre, anyway.” Yeah. So I like the international sense, in fact. It’s not practical to have no nationality, I think. I thought that the European Union was a superb idea. I lived in Switzerland, and when we were on the EMC experiment, we worked in France. So you would cross the border at least on a daily basis, sometimes two or three times a day, and except when there was some stir somewhere in the world, and then you just nodded at the border guard and went on through. So I found that a very nice situation. So I’m a little saddened that that way of living in Europe is coming apart.

Westfall:

Okay. Part of that…I spent part of last year in Lund University and heard a lot from them about sort of that growing sense of a Pan-European ideal in the ‘80s. So was that part of your general consciousness as a younger person of the European, that is the sort of ideal that led to the European Union.

Montgomery:

Well, the European Union came about mainly, I thought, to get around great difficulties in crossing the borders, basically. But I had friends in Russia and other parts of the world so in my case it wasn’t a chauvinistic European view, I don’t think. Yeah. Britain has a reputation for being a little parochial. You know, there’s the story about the headlines in the British newspapers which say, “Fog in Channel: Europe Isolated.” [Laughter] But I like to think that except for soccer, or other sports as well, I’m not being terribly chauvinistic.

Westfall:

Okay. You need to go right now, so let’s end until you are free later today.

[End of Part 1]

[Part 2]

Westfall:

Okay. Tape recorder is back on again. I think that in respect for your time, what I would like to do is to skip to your coming to JLab. But I would be interested in how your jobs at Fermilab put you into a position so that you were ready and able and willing to come to JLab and then tell the story of how they recruited you.

Montgomery:

Okay. So basically, I’ve had a continuing problem that I always say yes. So already with EMC I was spokesman. When I came to Fermilab, they asked me, “Would you like to be head of computing?” I said yes. At a certain point, the spokesman of E665 left the SSC Central Design group, and the group asked for me to be spokesman. So I said, “Yes, but Leon needs to let me out of computing,” and so he did. Two years later, John Peoples came in, and they were looking for a deputy head of Research Division. They asked me; I said yes. So I moved out of being spokesman of E665 and became Deputy Research Division Head. After another couple of years, Paul Grannis came asking me would I be interested in joining DZero, in leading their upgrade effort? I said yes, and John Peoples agreed to me moving out of Division Office and then going to DZero. After three years on DZero as the co-Upgrade Project leader, they asked me to be co-spokesman with Grannis and I said yes and did that for six years.

Then I was, I thought, tailing down a little and aiming to be a post-doc in Accelerator Division because the machine looked as though it needed help, and I thought I might be able to reshape myself. But Mike Witherell, then director, intervened and asked me to become Associate Director for Research. I did that for six years. So that takes us to 2008, and at that point, I was one of two Associate Directors, one for research (me), and one for accelerators (Steve Holmes) at Fermilab. So essentially I had half of the lab, 700 or 800 people in my sector. So this was, if you like, a series of increasing responsibilities, and after six years or so, a little less, 2007, Jefferson Lab approached me to consider being considered for the director position.

Westfall:

This was the search committee?

Montgomery:

This was the search committee. So I forget. I think it was Tom Appelquist approached me first, but Don Geesaman had worked with me on E665.

Westfall:

Oh, okay.

Montgomery:

He was eventually a spokesman of E665 after me. Actually, there was Heidi Schellman between us. But there was, if you like, a relationship between the physics that I had done for 21 years of my life, the electron and muon scattering work, and the work at Jefferson Lab. I suspect because of my leadership roles that I was considered.

At the time when they approached me, I was not looking to move. I somehow felt that there was more to be done at Fermilab, but I interviewed in D.C. for the position here. I think I was offered it. Certainly informally they had talked about it, but I declined. So things went quiet for two or three months. This version of it may be inaccurate. It’s my perception that they talked to Richard Milner of MIT, and then a little before Christmas, he decided that he did not want to take the position. So Tom Appelquist from Yale, who was the chair of the search committee, called me up, and I think basically he was looking for a way to appear to be active over the holidays. So he called me up and asked me if I’d think about it again.

So I don’t know what seriously had changed in my mind, but I said I’d never visited Jefferson Lab at all. So anyway, I took the thought and said, “Well, I’ll need to think about it. I will,” and so I went skiing over Christmas, as the family always does. So sometime on a Jackson Hole on a ski lift, on a chair lift, I probably decided that, well, it would be at least interesting to explore it; go see the Lab. So I told the Lab that I would like to visit to be able to think about it more, and I developed the sense that…Well, certainly there was this synergy with my earlier physics interests, so that was kind of natural. What was ironic was that I was spokesman of the EMC experiment at the time when they measured the difference between the structure functions in iron and the structure function in deuterium and had actually been the spokesman who had sent in the paper for consideration by Physics Letters. So it was ironic that part of the Jefferson Lab program was still to explore that effect. So there were little things like that that made it interesting.

At that stage I was 60. I’d been Associate Director at Fermilab for six years. There was a sense that six years was more or less my upper time limit on positions. I did six years as spokesman in DZero. I did six years as AD. My other jobs, it was more like three years and then asked to do something else three years. So I was probably ready for a change. I had the sense that you’re 60; you’ve got five years left. Maybe you could contribute something reasonably important, something to the field by taking that responsibility for five years or so. So that was how I came to be here.

You can ask what vision did I have for the Lab. I remember at the interview, which of course preceded me really taking on the thought. Bernard Frois was on the search committee. By the way, also on the search committee was Ernie Moniz, the Secretary of Energy.

Westfall:

Sure, current Energy Secretary.

Montgomery:

But with Bernard, I was insistent on treating the interview as me finding out what job they wanted me to do, and he was insistent that I must have some vision for where to take the Lab. However, I don’t really work like that. The Lab already existed, and since I’d never visited the Lab, I didn’t have an abstract vision for where it might go. What I have found and what I celebrate is that the basic machine is a gem. It’s a new machine now; we’ve rebuilt it to 12 GeV. But the underlying technology, the choice of superconducting radio frequency, the stability that that gives you, and the intensity of the machine and the control of polarization make it a base for a broader physics program than was ever dreamed of by the builders of the machine.

So just to give one example we’re in the middle of the first Accelerator Advisory Committee for Jefferson Lab right now, today. Therein lies a thought. But it just came up in conversation about an hour and a half ago that there are measurements made here of parity violation asymmetries which are of the scale of a few parts per billion, and that implies that the stability of the machine between the polarization up and the polarization down of the electrons in the machine has to be under control at a fantastic level for you to be able to make those measurements.

So that means that the machine has played a role in electroweak physics that I think was not really envisaged. Larry Cardman might correct me, but it was certainly not the dominant part of the program. It’s allowed measurements of the radius of the neutrons in a nucleus. Normally when you do a scattering of electrons, you measure something about the charge distribution. By doing the parity violation measurements, you’re able to access the neutron distribution, and it turns out that that is related to the way the neutrons hang together in a neutron star. So that’s a connection. The electroweak is a connection.

Then, because of the intensity of the machine, we’ve recently attracted a set of experiments which search for phenomena beyond the Standard Model. There is a class of theories which involves what is often called a heavy photon. It’s a theory that’s a little bit like quantum electrodynamics, but which has, instead of a massless photon as the mediator, a heavy photon (but not too heavy). It’s motivated by some yields of the measurements of the AMS experiment, for example. The antimatter search experiment in space has seen some phenomena that could be explained by a heavy photon being in existence.

So we have three experiments approved, one running on weekends right now in Hall B, which are looking for this phenomenon, and it’s done two things. It’s attracted groups from particle physics, so we’ve expanded the breadth of the interest in Jefferson Lab from the straightforward medium energy physics to a new community. Furthermore, it turns out that that attracted three very good young people who are working at SLAC. One of them is now doing very well at Stony Brook. The other couple went to Canada, and they’ve just come back to SLAC. If you look on the SLAC webpage, they’re excited about having these people as new faculty at SLAC. So it’s been a prompt for bringing in young people to recognize what Jefferson Lab can do and also for older physicists like John Jaros from SLAC to also recognize and to generate experiments on the machine. So this extra breadth is something I think that the Lab should feel very, very good about.

Westfall:

When you came, I don’t know a lot about the history of the lab during the period that you came. So when you came, Hall D was already—What was the status?

Montgomery:

So if you wish, I came into the Lab in a dream situation for a lab director. Three weeks after I arrived here, the Upgrade Project, a $340 million project, received construction approval.

Westfall:

Okay. So-called CD-something?

Montgomery:

CD-3.

Westfall:

Oh, CD-3. That was…

Montgomery:

CD-3, construction start. So that was, I don’t know, 20-something of September 2008. I came on Labor Day 2008. So if you like, the major thing that has happened while I’ve been in the Lab is that the construction of the 12 GeV Upgrade Project started and is nearly finished, but it was a situation where the 6 GeV also coexisted. For the time until May 2012, we were running a 6 GeV program. So I’ve got a very nice plot that I just happen to have hanging on my whiteboard which shows the number of staff, full-time equivalents, working on the Upgrade Project from October 2007 through to now in 15-day intervals. You see that at the beginning, the dip is essentially where I joined the Lab. So there had been a burst of activity to do the design work, but then there was a pause while the Department of Energy decided to say yes. Then we were, I don’t know, 20 or 30 or so FTEs working on the project. We built up to something close to 200, and we’ve then come down. Now it’s around about 50 on the right hand side of that plot. Now that’s an enormous swing and change of effort, and if you think that not all of those are complete people, then the actual number of people involved in the project swung up to maybe 50% of the Lab had something to do with the 12 GeV at the peak. So that’s a way of saying that it’s not just a matter of the building of the Upgrade Project.

In fact, there were also parallel infrastructure projects that went on. We also had in hand, when I joined the Lab, a Science Lab Infrastructure project that goes by an acronym TEDF, which is the Technical Engineering and Development Facility or something similar – I’m not sure I remember exactly what the acronym stands for. But that built us an extension of the SRF facility so that it could be laid out in a rational manner with the clean rooms in the appropriate places and supporting a work flow which was way better than the existing facilities, and also built us a new building to house engineers and also high bay areas, so that if you now walk out of the CEBAF Center towards the new facility, you’re walking in a very nice pedestrian walkway along the route that used to be a road that went from the CEBAF Center actually into the accelerator site. The access to the accelerator site has been moved, and we’re a much more, if you like, coherent and comfortable campus, at least most of the time. Right now we have three other construction projects going on which cut the place up.

So during the time we’ve also built up the Physics Program for the 12 GeV era. We may have gone too far. We have a backlog of several years, a little more than we would like. This is not helped by the tightness of funding, which limits and looks as though it might limit the operations weeks for the 12 GeV era.

Westfall:

When you said you’ve gone too far, you mean you’ve approved too many experiments?

Montgomery:

Yeah, possibly. That’s the nervousness. If we were able to operate the machine for 35 weeks a year, then we’d be okay. As it is, we’re beyond five years and that’s a backlog and that’s maybe a little long. It’s a problem that’s a good problem to have. If we built the machine, invested $340 million of taxpayers’ money and didn’t have any experiments wanting to run on the machine, it would be a disaster.

Westfall:

Right, people who wanted to run experiments. Right.

Montgomery:

Right. People are coming. We first of all tried to get our advisory committee to only recommend approval of the experiments that they felt were in the top half of the first five years of running, and that still finished us up with a backlog. Then recently, Bob McKeown confronted the issue and we had a special PAC a year ago or so which recommended to us what is called a high impact program. So we gave them a fixed number of days and said, “Please recommend the high impact program that would fit within this number of days of operation,” and the PAC did a pretty good job. Because we run three or four halls, then the conditions are dictated usually by a high priority hall, and it’s not always possible to put entirely high impact experiments operating concurrently in all of the halls. So this flexibility means that there is the opportunity for a lower priority experiment to run in one hall because it matches the parameters of the machine in another hall. So you need some flexibility to fill the program up and we will use that, but it means it’s not the case that only high impact experiments will run.

Westfall:

Okay. When you came, what did you see as some of the big challenges?

Montgomery:

So without disrespect to the people who were here in advance of me, I think that there was a tendency, which I’d seen in spades at Fermilab when I first got there, to have a collection of fiefdoms. So if you like, the Accelerator Division was an entity; the Experimental Physics Division was a different entity, and at some level there was a sense of competition between the two for resources that I felt did not mitigate for the most productive way of operating. Similarly, within the Experimental Physics Division, there were very well defined Hall A groups, Hall B groups, and Hall C groups which were reminiscent of the meson, proton, and neutrino areas in Fermilab, and there was an attempt to make each of those entities full service, which meant that you had engineers, physicists, and technicians in each of those separate halls and there wasn’t an opportunity to really optimize from one to the other.

Now the motivation is clear, and I talked to Larry about it quite a bit. The reason you do that is because there is a certain aspect of competitiveness in physics. Certainly at CERN we in EMC doing muon scattering were very conscious that we were in competition with the Steinberger group doing neutrino scattering, and at Fermilab, of course, it would be disingenuous to say that DZero was not in competition with CDF on the Tevatron Collider.

So on the other hand, when you’re talking about managing resources, then it’s a little luxurious to have a completely independent electronics group in one experiment and then a separate one in another experiment. So I had the sense that there was a certain tension within the Lab. I’m not sure whether it’s improved. I would like to think it has, of course, but in every lab I’ve been in, there has been a tension between trying to have a dedicated group on the one hand and to have matrixing of the resources across the lab. We continue to have that tension between a central engineering division and the individual divisions.

Westfall:

I tend to see these various laboratories as having specific lab cultures. It sounded like when you came there was this fiefdom which I think I have observed also. How would you characterize the sort of JLab culture, and did it strike you as different from that at Fermilab? You’ve talked a little bit about how the competition is the same, but how is it different than Fermilab?

Montgomery:

Again, an empirical observation which I think illustrates a difference in the character between the physicists at Fermilab and at Jefferson Lab would be that when I was Associate Director for Research at Fermilab, then it was relatively common for the big experiments to come in complaining about the level of the support that the Lab was providing for the analysis computing of the experiments. That was kind of a regular occurrence. Thus far, and it’s now up to nearly seven and a half years, I’ve never had a nuclear physicist come into this office complaining about computing at Jefferson Lab. Now I don’t actually believe that’s because they’re entirely satisfied with the situation. I think that in many ways the wish to run to the barricades, which is the way that a particle physicist thinks about solving his problems, I think there’s less of a tendency of that in the nuclear physics community.

Westfall:

As I always put it, high energy physicists run a little hot.

Montgomery:

[Chuckles] You could put it like that.

Westfall:

One sees this in physics departments, too. [Laughs]

Montgomery:

It’s always a little debatable. If you make a noise, do you get more response, or if you behave yourself, are you respected for it? In nuclear physics, over the last four or five years we’ve succeeded in getting a letter to the head of OMB and the Secretary of Energy, letters supporting nuclear physics from the six senators in Michigan, New York, and Virginia where the three major nuclear physics labs are situated. I recall going into a meeting with Jim Siegrist, head of the Office of High Energy Physics in the Department of Energy. I remember having a conversation with him, and he was admiring the fact that the nuclear physics community had managed to get themselves together to generate this letter. So I think that’s the positive side.

On the other side, maybe, although it’s changing, the user community could be a little more proactive in its political stance. As I say, it’s changing. We now have a regular nuclear physics day on the Hill in which we even get some of the younger physicists involved and they go visit the senators and the staff. But there is, I think, this difference between particle physics and nuclear physics in that respect. It may be that—Well, I don’t know. I’d be second-guessing the committee that chose me. I suspect I was not chosen for being silent.

Westfall:

The director who hired me here was Hermann Grunder. He was very focused. Of course, he was the founding director of the Laboratory. He talked a lot about his interactions with DOE. What have been some of the challenges with DOE? Hermann had huge fights all the time with DOE, screaming fights in the corridors. That was just the way he was, and then he’d come back and he’d want to tell me about them. My sense is that one of the biggest challenges of a laboratory director these days is dealing with DOE bureaucracy and requirements, which seems to have increased. I just wondered if you can speak to that.

Montgomery:

So…By the way, I think that the foundation on which this lab director got to work was somehow laid by Hermann, right? [Chuckles] So in a sense, I think that there is a memory of Hermann in DOE, and so to the extent that that was Jefferson Lab, then Jefferson Lab maybe carries a bit of a reputation with some of the senior members of the Department of Energy who were around at that time. There is always tension, and it’s a little strange. We are required to perform according to the contract that is signed, the M&O contract, and the evaluation process is entirely controlled by the Department of Energy. They have control over the mechanisms, so we have a PEMP, Performance Evaluation Management Process program, which evaluates us in eight categories. The weighting of the different categories is controlled by the Department of Energy and is changed on occasions, and we have, from time to time, notable outcomes that are assigned in these different categories. We certainly have a sense that we are required to deliver to their bidding.

So on the other hand, the Department would like to think that there’s a partnership, and sometimes the fact that there’s an evaluation process and punitive aspects to it—letters of criticism and grading that affects the fee and affects whether or not you get an extension of your contract—these things certainly don’t make for a fuzzy warm feeling in the interaction. On the other hand, there have been initiatives which have attempted to mitigate the requirements. Certainly our site office manager has tried within certain boundaries to reduce the number of requirements that are in our contract.

But I think if you postulate that one of the sources of tension for a lab director is the interaction with the Department, then I think you’re absolutely right. The interaction with different pieces of the Department is different. I interact mainly with the Office of Nuclear Physics. I interact less maybe than I should with the Office of Science management. Of course I interact a lot with the local site office. But also there’s a tendency to attribute to us more control than we have.

For example, if there is an article in a newspaper which is read by the Department as being, if you like, outside of their view of the life of the Lab as it is now, or if you like, the intended ambitions of the Lab, then we receive criticism. So one area of tension at the moment is that we are working on a design for a new machine, an Electron-Ion Collider. We’ve worked collaboratively with Brookhaven on the development—with both communities, I should say—on the development of a physics case which is documented in a white paper and has been well received, not only within the United States nuclear physics community, but also much more broadly. It received a recommendation that that’s the next big project to follow FRIB in 2020 or 2021.

However, there is a nervousness that both Brookhaven and Jefferson Lab have designs for that machine and would like to build that machine. There was RIA, which became the FRIB proposal won by Michigan State in competition with Argonne. Going further back, there was competition for what eventually became Jefferson Lab. But the Department of Energy is quite nervous about this sense of competition, and so when the governor of Virginia gave his State of the Commonwealth address a year and a half ago and he said, “We’re going to support the Jefferson Lab proposal to do some preparation work in order for them to compete for the Electron-Ion Collider. We’re not going to let any New Yorker come down and pick up our Electron-Ion Collider.” When that hits the press, of course it goes back to DOE and it is thought that the Jefferson Lab director should somehow get control of the governor in Virginia and that’s outside my capabilities. [Chuckles] That generates tension. They’re very worried about even the use of the word competition.

So the other aspect of that is that at multiple levels, as you know, it’s part of a lab director’s job to somehow encourage the support of the field and the labs by Congress. So we visit the staffers, typically the Virginia delegation and the committee staffers, and then often together the nuclear physics directors (FRIB, Brookhaven, and Jefferson Lab), plus a respected senior member of the field at large visit the staffers together. So when the Jefferson Lab or Brookhaven director goes alone and the result is a mark in a congressional markup which puts down a number of dollars, say, or a number of weeks of running or something like that, then there is strong criticism that he’s caused Congress to put that parochial request in place and it’s constraining…In the case of the individual within the nuclear physics, it’s constraining what happens. Then when it’s the three or four lab representatives of nuclear physics, then the care has to be that we don’t get too good a deal for nuclear physics at the expense of, say, basic energy sciences or high energy physics. The line between doing your duty by telling what the situation is with the given funding level, whether or not you can exploit the facilities that you have, and being seen as destructive for the alternatives is very fine. It’s very hard to tread cleanly, and that’s another source of tension that comes in with the Department.

I don’t know whether you know these numbers. When I was at the National Lab Directors meeting in December, there were only two lab directors there who were at the equivalent meeting at the end of 2008. Out of 17 lab directors, I was up to number two in seniority. I think somebody told me that they’d calculated the average dwell time is, I think, a little less than four years. So I kind of figure that coming up to eight is a fair shot.

Westfall:

Yeah. It’s almost like what a shame, but it’s like there’s a shelf life and then they’re going to…

Montgomery:

Yes. It’s not quite like a basketball coach, but there’s a certain turnover, yeah. [Chuckles]

Westfall:

Yeah. Interesting. One quick thing. I don’t want to keep you. There was this change from being SURA and then being SURA plus some company as the contracting officer. And this was part of an overall greater, you know, focus on industrial partnerships and a more bureaucratic way of managing the labs. Do you have anything to say about that? You were here when they made that change?

Montgomery:

I was not, but I have a perspective. So it’s not clear to me that it was an enhancement of the bureaucratic aspect. My understanding is that there had been a considerable amount of concern that the Department didn’t have anywhere to go with the various M&O contractors—didn’t have a single place to go or was worried about whether or not a consortium of 60-odd universities here, 80-odd in the URA organization at Fermilab, and then on the other hand the University of California for the weapons labs like Los Alamos, whether or not these M&O contractors had somewhere they could go to take responsibility. As recompete came up, then various organizations tried to respond, so we saw that at the transition from Witherell to Oddone at Fermilab, and with a recompete in prospect, then there was the creation of FRA (Fermi Research Associates), which was a partnership between the 82 universities that were part of URA and the University of Chicago, with the idea, I think, that Pier had, that the accountability by having the University of Chicago as the point that the Department could go to and say, “That person is in charge,” that that would sell well with the Department of Energy and would avoid the sense of an amorphous lack of responsibility because in principle, it’s the president of the universities that are in URA. But in the end, it was not typical that the university president actually paid any attention.

So the solution offered at Fermilab—and I was on the team that did the proposal—was to create Fermi Research Associates. It had 50% University of Chicago, 50% URA with the chair of the board being the president of the University of Chicago. What SURA did in order to compete for the operations of the Lab was to search for an industrial partner, and there the thesis was that SURA gave the link to academia and that the industrial partner would bring in excellence in management operations, if you wish. In fact, the piece of Computer Sciences Corporation that they selected had a number of government contracts for operations of ranges for the Navy or for the Army or for the Air Force, your fairly substantial swatch of government contracts. The way they created Jefferson Science Associates, LLC the intention is we get the science and the academic interest from the SURA piece of the game and we get support in the operations side from the industrial partner.

So the way it has worked is that the industrial partner has provided backup when, say, we have a spate of injuries of a certain type. We would like to understand why what we’re doing that isn’t hacking it. Then we have regular meetings with the representatives from that company, and we can ask for a review to be done by them. No penalty. It’s not a DOE review. They come in and advise us what we’re doing wrongly or rightly, and they’ve also helped, for example, in cyber security. They provided a team that attacked us and tried to penetrate. So they have four people on the board. SURA has six people on the board, and I’m a non-voting member of the board and president of JSA. But that mix actually provides the basis for how the Lab operates, but they do not insist in this case on a particular pattern of behavior. I have heard, but do not know, that the situation in some other labs is much more prescriptive in how the Lab is managed internally. That actually doesn’t happen here. If I ask for help, I get help, but they do not send in a team to tell me what to do.

Westfall:

Unless you ask.

Montgomery:

Unless I ask.

Westfall:

So you think that it works…You know, is it on balance a help?

Montgomery:

On balance, it’s a help, yeah. They’re not as fully engaged at the top level. For example, the SURA representative Jerry Draayer is much more my day-to-day boss than is Karl Williams, the head of PAE. But on the other hand, if I call and then Karl responds and the other members on the committee. They share serious functions. So the chair of the Finance Committee for Jefferson Science Associates is a member of the board appointed by the PAE side, and the head of the committee that looks after safety, that also comes through the PAE side. So these are important functions, and it’s very nice to have somebody to call. It can get a little lonely in an office like this.

Westfall:

Okay. Well, is there anything last that you would like to say, speak your mind about?

Montgomery:

Well, this is a sentiment rather than a historical statement, but it might be useful to have on record that I do not at all regret having taken this position. I have enjoyed the Lab and I hope that the Lab has enjoyed me. It’s certainly been exciting, and I think we’ve done a fair amount. I’m of course too close to it to have any real perspective, but the reaction of people around me isn’t…I don’t get the sense that it’s, “Hey, good riddance. Get rid of the bum.” [Chuckles] So I’m quite happy with what we’ve done.

Westfall:

Terrific.