Bevatron

Interview with Barry Barish, Linde Professor of Physics Emeritus at Caltech, where he retains a collaboration with LIGO, and Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC Riverside. Barish recounts his childhood in Los Angeles and emphasizes that sports were more important than academics to him growing up. He explains his decision to attend Berkeley as an undergraduate, where his initial major was engineering before he realized that he really loved physics, and where he was advised by Owen Chamberlain. Barish describes the fundamental work being done at the Radiation Lab and how he learned to work the cyclotron. He explains why Fermi became his life-long hero and why he decided to stay at Berkeley for graduate school, even though the school’s general policy required students to pursue their doctoral work elsewhere. Barish describes his graduate research under the direction of Carl Hemholz, and he explains how he developed a relationship with Richard Feynman which led to his postdoc and ultimately, his faculty appointment at Caltech. He discusses how his interest in neutrinos led to his work at Fermilab and why the big question at the time was how to discover the W boson. Barish describes his key interests in magnetic monopoles and neutrino oscillations, and he describes his involvement with the SSC project through a connection with Maury Tigner at Berkeley, which developed over the course of his collaborations with Sam Ting. He explains that his subsequent work with LIGO never would have happened had the SSC been viable, and he describes his early connection as a young student learning general relativity as a connecting point to LIGO. Barish describes his general awareness of what Rai Weiss had been doing prior to 1994 and he relates the state of affairs of LIGO at that point. He conveys the intensity of his involvement from 1994 to 2005 and he describes the skepticism surrounding the entire endeavor and what success would have looked like without any assurance that the experiment would actually detect gravitational waves. Barish describes the road to detection as one of incremental improvements to the instrumentation achieved over several years, including the fundamental advance of active seismic isolation. He narrates the day of the detection, and he surveys the effect that the Nobel Prize has had on the LIGO collaboration and its future prospects. Barish notes the promise that AI offers for the future of LIGO, and he prognosticates the future viability of the ILC. At the end of the interview Barish explains what LIGO has taught us about the universe, and what questions it will allow us to ask in the future as a result of its success. 

Interview with Timothy James Symons, Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and recently retired as Associate Laboratory Director for Physical Sciences, for which he ran the Lab’s programs in high energy and nuclear physics. Symons explains how the Lab has responded to the pandemic and the wide range of physics research he is following at Berkeley and beyond. He recounts his childhood in England and his early interests in science and the opportunities that led to his undergraduate education at Oxford where a tutor focused his interests in nuclear physics. Symons explains his reasons for remaining at Oxford for graduate school and the relevance of the SU(3) shell model for his thesis. He describes his postdoctoral work at the UK Science Research Council, and the opportunities that initially led him to Berkeley to work with David Scott on low energy nuclear structure. Symons provides a history of the Bevatron and the many reasons that compelled him to take a staff position. He describes the challenges in replacing the Bevelac, and the import of the ISABELLE cancellation at Brookhaven on Berkeley’s decisions. He provides detail on the interplay between laboratory experiments and DOE policy decisions and he explains the significant administrative pull of his work for NSAC. Symons reviews broadly the state of U.S. nuclear physics in the 1990s and the value of the APS as a sounding board in shaping policies for the decade. He does the same for rare isotopes in the early 2000s and how the Lab became involved in DUSEL. Symons describes his world as Associate Lab Director and he discusses his interactions with the Lab Director which gave him a high-altitude appreciate for the broad range of research across the Lab. He explains the Lab’s contributions in energy research which stems from Steve Chu’s directorship. At the end of the interview, Symons reflects on the significant changes in the Lab’s scope and mission over his career, the overall trend that once-disparate research areas are now increasingly on a path of convergence, and he conveys optimism on the fundamental discoveries that are within reach for the near future of nuclear physics.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Arthur Poskanzer, distinguished senior scientist emeritus at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Poskanzer recounts his childhood in Manhattan and his experience at Stuyvesant High School where he focused on chemistry. He discusses his undergraduate studies at Harvard and his decision to study at MIT under Charles Coryell in radio chemistry. Poskanzer describes his postgraduate research at Brookhaven where he studied high-energy protons on uranium, and he explains his decision to transfer to Berkeley Lab to work with Earl Hyde on the Bevatron. He explains how he discovered the collective flow of nuclear matter and he describes the origins of the Plastic Ball experimental group. Poskanzer discusses the contributions of the STAR collaboration and the discovery of elliptic flow and the existence of quark gluon plasma. He compares the experiences that led to his discovery of 28 isotopes and why he enjoyed discovering Helium-8 the most. Poskanzer explains the connection between his study of isotope decay and the value this had for solar neutrino experiments, and he explains why 28 was the “magic number” for neutron excess sodium isotopes. At the end of the interview, he describes how Berkeley Lab has changed over the years, and in reflecting on all the discovery he was a part of, Poskanzer emphasizes that successful scientists have an intuition that allows them to pick projects primed for success.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Samuel C.C. Ting, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Physics at MIT and Guest Professor of the Director General of CERN. Ting describes his long-term, unpaid affiliations with CERN and DESY, he recounts his childhood in Michigan, and he describes the opportunities that led to his parents to pursue graduate degrees at the University of Michigan. He explains why he returned with his parents to China before the Second World War, and he describes his family’s experiences during the war. Ting describes his own decision to return to the United States for his undergraduate studies after his family fled from the mainland to Taiwan in 1948, where he lived for eight years, before enrolling in the engineering program at the University of Michigan. He conveys his love for Michigan football, his near brush with the draft, and he explains his decision to remain at Michigan for graduate school. Ting explains his decision to focus on experimentation after initially considering theory, and he discusses his work on the Bevatron at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley. He describes his dissertation research on pion proton elastic scattering, and his contribution to the finding that that diffraction peak of this scattering does not shrink with increased energy. Ting explains the opportunities that led to his work at CERN to work on proton-proton scattering with Giuseppe Cocconi, and his positive experiences as a junior faculty member at Columbia University. He explains his collaboration with Stanley Brodsky and this connection with his work at DESY, and he relates Feynman’s humorous congratulatory telegram shortly after he won the Nobel Prize on the J particle. Ting explains the significance of this work, and that of Burt Richter at SLAC whose work was entirely independent from Ting’s. He explains his decision to deliver his Nobel acceptance speech in Mandarin, he describes the challenges of distraction owing to the recognition, and he explains how he became interested in space-based experiments. He discusses his increasing involvement with NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE) in pursuing his goal of large-scale experiments, where he has concentrated on measuring the spectrum of electrons. He explains the origins and outlook for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), and he projects that attaining higher energies will continue to advance fundamental discovery which will serve as complements to land-based accelerator experiments. Ting discusses the discovery of the gluon by the Positron-Electron Tandem Ring Accelerator (PETRA) collaboration, and the influence of his research on the standard electroweak model, and he reflects on what it will take to understand dark matter. At the end of the interview, Ting expresses gratitude for the support he has received from MIT over the course of his career, and he makes the case for why governments should continue to support basic science research, even in fields for which no immediate benefit to humanity is readily apparent.