Accelerators

Interview with Alvin Trivelpiece, American physicist who served as Director of the Office of Energy Research in the United States Department of Energy from 1981-1987. Trivelpiece provides an overview of his graduate studies at Caltech and his background in plasma physics. He discusses in detail his involvement in the beginnings of the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider), including cost estimations, funding requests, site selection, and attempts to secure international collaboration. Trivelpiece shares stories involving many key players who were supporters of the SSC, as well as some who were opposed. He also touches on the creation of other DOE projects such as Fermilab and CEBAF (Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility).

The interviewee has not given permission for this interview to be shared at this time. Transcripts will be updated as they become available to the public. For any questions about this policy, please contact [email protected].

The interviewee has not given permission for this interview to be shared at this time. Transcripts will be updated as they become available to the public. For any questions about this policy, please contact [email protected].

Interview with Herman B. White, physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. White recounts his childhood in Tuskegee, Alabama and growing up during segregation. He discusses his early interests in science and his decision to enroll at Earlham College in Indiana as an undergraduate. White then describes his time at Michigan State University as a graduate student, during which he also held a position as a resident research associate at Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. White talks about his transition from nuclear physics to particle physics upon completing his master’s degree at MSU. He discusses the events that led him to accept a position at Fermilab rather than immediately pursue a PhD. White was the first African-American scientist appointed at Fermilab, and he recounts his early years there being mentored by Raymond Stefanski. He then describes his research fellowship at Yale and his non-traditional path to getting a PhD in 1991 from Florida State University. White talks about returning to Fermilab to work on kaon physics, and his eventual involvement in the Tevatron experiment. Toward the end of the interview, White reflects on the changes and trends he has seen in the research being done at Fermilab over the years, as well as his involvement in the National Society of Black Physicists.

Interview with Kenneth Lande, professor emeritus in the Department of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. Lande recounts his early childhood in Austria and his family’s escape to New York City from the Nazis has a young boy. Lande describes his interest in science, which he developed during his time at Brooklyn Tech, which he pursued as an undergraduate at Columbia. He describes working on bubble chambers under the direction of Leon Lederman at Nevis Lab in Westchester, and why he gave no consideration to graduate schools other than Columbia. Lande discusses his research at Brookhaven and he describes the major projects of the early 1950s including the Cosmotron and Lederman’s cloud chamber. He describes his thesis research on K mesons and explains that he accepted a job offer at the University of Pennsylvania before he defended his dissertation. Lande describes Penn’s and Princeton’s joint effort to become competitive in accelerator physics, and he explains his growing involvement in neutrino physics and work at Los Alamos in the 1960s. He explains the need to work underground when studying neutrino events caused by cosmic rays, and he describes his involvement with the Homestake mine collaboration. Lande describes his research involving gallium at the Baksan Observatory in the Soviet Union, the importance of the Kamiokande experiment, and he provides a history of neutrino physics that connects Darwin to Hans Bethe. He compares his research at Brookhaven, Fermilab, and Los Alamos, and he explains why he discourages undergraduates from memorizing anything as a way to encourage critical thinking. At the end of the interview Lande reflects on how collaborations have grown enormously over the course of his career, and looking ahead, he sees his contributions to neutrino research as prelude to something much bigger and fundamental for future discovery.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Ralph Nelson, a radiation physicist at SLAC who retired just shy of forty years of service. He explains Panofsky’s original decision for Nelson to split his time doing physics and helping to create the radiation protection group, for which he did shielding calculations to ensure safety both to SLAC employees and to the surrounding community. He describes his research in accelerator health physics, and he recounts his education at Berkeley and his research as a nuclear emulsion scanner at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Nelson describes the scene at SLAC when he arrived in 1964, and he describes the arrangement by which he would pursue a Ph.D. in muon physics as an inter-departmental student in nuclear engineering, radiology, and physics, while retaining his employment. He explains the complex challenges associated with identifying the most dangerous areas in the lab in order to develop and deploy shielding. Nelson describes his advisory work for the site selection committee for the SSC, and he describes how he needed to tailor his safety objectives relative to different research endeavors over the years. At the end of the interview, Nelson reflects on Panofsky’s overarching vision for SLAC, and how his concern over radiation exposure was paramount in all of his considerations.

Interview with Willy Haeberli, Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. Haeberli recounts his childhood in Basel, Switzerland, and he describes his experiences as a student during World War II. He discusses his early interest in physics and his decision to pursue nuclear physics at the University of Basel under the direction of Paul Huber. Haeberli describes his graduate research on the ionization of gasses by alpha particles, and he describes the circumstances leading to his subsequent postdoctoral job at the University of Wisconsin, where he was attracted to work with Raymond Herb in accelerator physics. He explains some of the scientific and cultural adjustments in order to settle in at Madison, and he describes the central questions of the structure of atomic nuclei that propelled nuclear physics at that time. He describes his subsequent research at Duke University before returning to Madison to join the faculty, he describes his many research visits to ETH Zurich, the Max Planck Institute, Fermilab, Saclay, and at DESY in Hamburg, and he offers insight on some of the differences in approach between American and European accelerator labs. Haeberli reflects on his contributions to the study of polarized protons and deuterons and angular momentum assignments. He discusses his work developing gas targets of pure spin polarized hydrogen and deuteron atoms, and he describes the critical support of the DOE and the NSF for this research. Haeberli shares his feelings on being elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and he explains his preference teaching undergraduates to graduate students. At the end of the interview, Haeberli describes how the department of physics at Wisconsin has changes over his decades of service, and he explains how only with the benefit of historical hindsight can one distinguish the truly important advances in the field. 

Interview with Paul Emma, retired and formerly Senior Staff Scientist at SLAC. Emma recounts his childhood in Illinois, and he describes his undergraduate work at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He explains why he left WWU early to accept an opportunity for graduate work at Caltech briefly before accepting a job at Fermilab where he worked in operations on the Main Ring and the Tevatron project. He describes the series of events leading to his work at SLAC, where he worked in operations and design on the LCLS, the SLC, and the NLC. Emma describes his work for the superconducting undulator for Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, and at the end of the interview he discusses his ongoing work on LCLS-II.

Interview with Katherine Harkay, Senior Scientist at the Advanced Proton Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory. Harkay describes the APS upgrade and how the APS informs her broader views about the interplay of theory and experiment in accelerator physics. She recounts her childhood in New York City, the import of her Hungarian heritage, and her early interests in science. Harkay describes her undergraduate work at St. John’s and her attractions to experimental physics before entering the PhD program at Purdue. She describes her work at Fermilab and the opportunities that led to her work with Yanglai Cho at Argonne and the origins of the APS.  Harkay explains the broad range of experiments done at the APS and she describes the investigation of high-intensity limits and the safety considerations that ensure its proper operation. She discusses her work on cathode research and development and she explains the administrative responsibilities she took on after being named accelerator physics group leader. Harkay surveys Argonne’s efforts to bring more women into leadership positions and the broader value of a diversity of perspectives in science. At the end of the interview, Harkay emphasizes the importance of public outreach, and she cites the value of the APS’s value in X-ray imaging of the SARS-CoV-2 protein to exemplify the point.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Chris Quigg, Distinguished Scientist Emeritus at Fermi National Accelerator Lab. He discusses his current book project Grace in All Simplicity with his colleague Bob Cahn, and he recounts his upbringing in Pennsylvania and his early interests in science. He describes his undergraduate experience at Yale where he worked with Itzhak Kelson, and his fascination with accelerator physics. Quigg discusses his decision to attend Berkeley for his graduate work and his formative summer work at Livermore. He describes the influence of J.D. Jackson’s course on the dynamics of strong interactions and how he developed his research on rho meson resonances under Jackson’s direction. Quigg discusses his postdoctoral and then faculty position at Stony Brook, and the dual attractions of Brookhaven Lab and the Institute for Theoretical Physics under the leadership of C.N. Yang. He describes his work on two-Reggeon exchange reactions and his interest in the deep inelastic scattering results coming out of SLAC at this time. Quigg discusses the circumstances leading to him joining Fermilab, and he discusses the import of research on weak neutral current, the W and Z bosons, and the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam theory. He describes the fundamental importance of Lederman’s discovery of the Upsilon, and he discusses his contributions to the research going on at CERN in the 1970s. Quigg recounts his involvement in planning the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) and he describes his work thereafter at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL). Toward the end of the interview, Quigg shares his ideas on the current state of high energy physics and the ongoing prospects for fundamental discoveries.