Barschall/Haeberli Symposium

My experience at UW (1951-1960) was unusual

Here as UG (Ray Herb)-Field Emission Ion Source

GS (HHB): Thesis work, I hardly saw Heinz

Postdoc (HHB): n-4He scattering on new tandem

Heinz and finding jobs

Wisconsin on forefront of nuclear science

I followed Heinz as PRC Editor, will talk about his influences there

Martin Walt was scheduled to describe this period.

He can’t be here, but you should read his elegant essay.

I’ll quote it when appropriate and show some of his pictures

Coming to UWI grew up on a farm near Columbus, Wis.

Attended a one room school: 1 teacher, 8 grades, 26 students

Intended to farm: no college prep, Math through geometry; Lots of FFA

Last minute decision, summer after HS to come to UW as Math major, but soon changed to physics

Second semester of sophomore year, started hourly work with Ray Herb

Working with Ray Herb

Ray Herb a driving force in the UW PD for many years

Developed much the machinery of nuclear physics: pressurized Van de Graaff, getter ion pumps, negative ion sources, Pelletrons, the highest energy VdGs.

In 1953, Ray was building a new organic free VdG, in many ways the precursor of the large Tandems made by the company NEC he later founded.

My first physics job: drilling holes with complicated shapes in 500 kovar spheres for this VdG

Then a Senior Thesis: Field Emission Ion Source

Sterling Hall (1952, from M. Walt), then home of Physics.

Field Emission Ion SourceThe idea: Produce a proton beam by field emitting protons from metal tip with roughly the radius of visible light.

Why? The emitting area will be tiny, giving very good optical properties (emittance)

How? There’s the rub!

Hollow rod made of Palladium which transmits hydrogen

Etch a fine tip.

Apply positive voltage. Electric fields around ≈ 5 Volts/Angstrom

Out come the protons!!

Palladium

Here’s a Field Ion Microscope example: Platinum tip emitting protons. Each dot is an atom

What’s to doTo do (Crazy job for an UG working alone)

Etch a fine tip

Make a getter ion pump

Make Einzel Lenses

Assemble power supplies, etc.

Became a graduate student—Stayed at UW. Also around this time built, with Alan Johnsrud, a prototype for Ray’s NRC getter ion pump.

Turn on the voltage

Result: NADA!!! Or Not A Damn Ampere !

Why? Obviously many things could be wrong.

BUT: The real problem: If you calculate the tensile strength of Pd, it can’t stand the electrical force; we’d known it was marginal.

Tried with a tungsten point in around 10-4 mm Hg, of H2, hoping to desorb the H attracted to tip by dipole forces, as in field ion microscope. NADA!!

GAVE UP. Time to do a thesis. I changed advisors--to HHB

Reason for a Change

Here’s why

On the right is the farm where Ray Herb grew up.

Also the place where his niece Mary grew up

The Herb Farm, near Bonduel, Wisconsin

Mary and I became close friends (she now has been my wife for 55 years)

I felt uncomfortable continuing to work with Ray.

And I was driven more by physics than accelerator development. And preferred to graduate quickly.

THINKING OF WORKING FOR HEINZ-IF HE WERE WILLING

Some quotes from Martin Walt (view of HHB in 1950):

“…Barschall had a fearsome reputation as a no-nonsense, rigorous, humorless, strict, authoritarian taskmaster. He was tall, ramrod straight, and in those days, not easily moved to laughter.”

"I suppose you will learn a lot from Professor Barschall, but have you thought of what will happen if you make a mistake?“

“Evidently Heinz's early education had included horsemanship and like everything he did, he had mastered the lessons perfectly.

“Barschall's concern for his students was legendary. He adopted his students for life, maintained contact with them, and supplied advice, job recommendations, and professional help forever.”

If I’d seen these all in advance I might have hesitated. But I didn’t. And in the end I believe all of them are accurate, except that the first was exaggerated by the time I was involved.

H. H. Barschall in 1960. Born April 29, 1915. He had this reputation by age 35.

Graduate Experience

I didn’t feel a great rush to finish grad schoolI was a dorm house fellow for a year—a major time sinkAnd I continued to work on that senior thesisAnd spent a lot of time in a sailboat on Lake MendotaAnd playing bridge in the Pine Room

When I finally passed Prelims and started my thesis, Heinz was busy. Chair of PhysicsWorking on getting a Tandem for the Department , the first in the US

I saw him, I think, four timesWhen he proposed a thesis topic after I passed prelimAt 4:30 one morning when he couldn’t sleep and came in to check upWhen I handed him my thesisAt Thesis OralsBut he had arranged plenty of help:

Bud Darden (Notre Dame), Al Okazaki (CRNL), and Zdzislaw Wilhelmi, Two solid, experienced, researchers and one wild man

Los Alamos Summer

In 1957 Heinz arranged summer jobs for Bob Shamu and me at Los Alamos

It was all still behind the fence so we got Q clearances

My job was to study Mie Scattering with Jerry Conner

Mie scattering occurs when light and droplet sizes are similar. All wavelengths scatter similarly—It makes clouds white.

Used a diffusion cloud chamber; spent the whole summer trying to make it work.

The other event of the summer was driving to the Nevada Test Site to see bomb tests from News Nob in Aug. 1957

Top: Franklin Prime 4.7 kton (about twice expected).

Bottom: Smoky 44 kton. http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/DOENTSAtmospheric.pdf Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing 1951-63\

Thesis Cast of Characters

The control room (M. Walt)Bob Becker, Al Okazaki, Bud Darden in Room 23 (M. Walt)

Zdzislaw Wilhelmi

Active WWII Home Army;

Doctorate, Warsaw U, ‘54;

President of Polish Physical Society (3x);

IAEA Geneva (1970-80);

Made him rich in Polish Zl.

Only Jaguar in Poland No serious picture from that era.

The Equipment

The LONG (20 ft.) TANK

Voltage : 4 Million Volts

During my time used only one dome

The 3 ¾” diameter textolite tubes (3) that support the structure had collapsed, repaired BUT there was a lucite support

Insulating gas 100 psi air. Topped up daily.

Fire danger: 100 psi air means lots of oxygen, Cotton belt, textolite (paper + shellac), motor

CO2

Exhaust

The Experiment: Polarization of n’s from 7Li (p, n)Measure n’s scattered left and right from liquid oxygen

L/R polarization, if know properties of analyzer

Liquid 16O in thin walled cigar container, Styrofoam insulation, filled every 10-15 minutes. Easy to make, hard work experiment.

n’s detected with high pressure proportional counters.

Counts recorded in simple scalers

Ep: 2.2 to 3.0 MeV

Was a low rate experiment, pray for events

EXCITEMENT

Had a small fire, motor burned out

Tank of CO2 under the tank, but hard to reach--PANIC

Dumped the gas through 3 “ exhaust pipe-a loud banshee scream

Story: we wakened the hospital patients across the street??

Back on the air in a few days after replacing the belt motor

ResultsVery simple to analyze raw data—fairly complicated corrections for backgrounds, multiple n scattering in target, etc..

Results disappointing--hard to interpret. A little scanty.

Decided to do a detailed theoretical analysis:

When the data is marginal it takes a lot of theory to interpret.

For me another reason: nuclear theory wasn’t taught at Wisconsin and I wanted that background.

Learned a lot about R-Matrix theory: 3, 6, 9-J symbols, etc

Could only place weak constraints on structure of 8Be, data not good enough

I hear later that Heinz had wished I would quit spending my time with this stuff and publish. But he didn’t interfere.

He was, mostly, right. I turned in my thesis in April, but it could have been many months earlier.

A surprise: I had received an NSF Postdoc award—My first indication of HHB’s helpfulness and attention. I decided to spend it at Oxford University and begin in October.

WilhelmiSomething, probably his army experience, gave him a daring personality

At Wisconsin Drove a Harley type motor cycle, had an apartment filled with vodka bottles

In doing calculations of analyzing power of oxygen exhausted HHB’s computer budget. Heinz thought I should have controlled him better.

Was rumored to have removed (cutoff tool in a lathe) the stainless steel cover of a neutron source so he could better measure the neutron spectrum. True???

In Warsaw was clearly influential.Drove his Jaguar up to the steps of the Opera House and parked.

To Fill the Time and Use the New TandemRead an old paper of HHB’s

(Recoil energy spectrum) (cross section (cos ∝ θ))

Knewn - 4He scattering cross sections

only known over limited energy range and interpretation was uncertain.

Bob Shamu made a high pressure gas scintillation counter for 20Ne (n, α ) measurements-we could fill it with helium.

A lot of details: get good resolution, check linearity of system, get high pressure: 900 psi of He + Xe

But it all worked well and we had results by the end of summer. “Better” (GTP) phase shifts described data worse

GTP

DGS

Comments about Wisconsin Nuclear Physics

Had the best technology for nuclear physics

Was in a transition period from VdGs to TandemsProportional counters to much higher efficiency scintillators (e.g.

stilbene)Scalers to multichannel analyzers

Two years later my thesis would have been much better done.

Wisconsin 100 channel MCA gave a printed tape. Harwell’s requiredreading out 100 Dekatrons and registers and writing them down.

Although it wasn’t fancy, the UW system worked well..

Compare to Harwell

Heinz’ Care of Students My Fellowship was for one year and toward the end of that year Heinz started contacting people who might have positions.

PROBLEM: Letters didn’t reach me and HHB thought I was ignoring them and making us both look bad. I wasn’t.

My office was not in the Clarendon Lab, my official address, but in the Old Physiology Lab and later the Old Girls High School and there was another S. Austin at Oxford. So the secretarial staff didn’t always get it right. But Heinz clearly didn’t believe me-he KNEW the British Post Office was efficient and told me so. That took a while to work out, but in the end I went to Stanford as an Asst. Prof..

When I prepared to leave Stanford both Heinz and Stan Hanna wrote letters looking for positions. I had a Sloan Fellowship and was pretty full of myself I guess, and immediately turned down possibilities I didn’t think were the best I could get.

I got some advice: don’t turn anything down until you have something better in hand.

And when I was later choosing among options he gave me what I learned later was insightful and accurate advice. I took it and am glad I did.

After that I thought I needed less help, but the Washington Dinners were a continuing connection.

Wisconsin Academics

Not so much attention to UG teaching

UGQuantum Mechanics: Lots of Bohr Sommerfeld Quantization. Never got to the Schroedinger Equation

E&M: Lots of circuits. Never got to Maxwell’s Equations

Optics: Lectures read directly from Jenkins and white—text in hand

HHB and Physical Review CPRE-HISTORY

In the beginning there was Physical Review 1893 And PR begat PR A + B 1964 And PR A + B begat PR 1234 1966 If you come to a forkAnd PR 1234 begat PR12345 1967 in the road, TAKE IT Y

Berra And PR 12345 begat PRA + PRB + PRC + PRD 1970

PRE

WHY ? The great growth in the published literaturePR 1893-1896 0.5 Book per yearPR 1897 1 BookPR 1898 2 BooksPR 1893-98 ≈ PR (1951) ≈ 0.1 PR (92) ≈ PRC(92)

WHY was the final split into separate journals different?Each journal had it’s own editor, (eventually an expert in the field) who

understood the science and had the expertise for good referee choices.

Formation of Divisions (DNP in 1966) was, according to Heinz, partly a result of dissatisfaction with Physical Review and decisions of editors

with little expertise in the field

The EditorsTHE TRANSITION--A holding operation, minimal changes

1970—S. Pasternack, J.R. Roesser, and P.D. Adams1971—P. Adams

FIRST REMOTE EDITORS 1972-1988 H. H. (Heinz) Barschall M. Weiss, Co-Editor after 7/1984

AND THEN1988-2002 Sam Austin2002-present Ben Gibson

Mort Weiss (1993)

Events in the Life of PRC

EARLY EVENTS—HHB Emphasis on improving refereeing (knowledgeable referees) and referee response time, plus other technical improvements. Searchable data bases for referees were becoming available (Adams, et al.)

A survey of the prices of journals: The Cost-Effectiveness of Physics Journals, H.H. Barschall, Physics Today, July, 1988Compared journals on Price/character-Impact Factor

Journal Price (1987) Price/1000 character Impact Factor Cost/Impact $ Cents

J. Phys. G 440 5.5 1.5 3.7Nucl. Phys. A 3000 7.4 2.5 3.0Phys. Rev. C 365 1.1 2.0 0.52Z. Phys. A 712 8.1 1.6 4.9

Results--Large difference in Cost/Impact ratio

Gordon-Breach (highest cost/impact) sued HHB, AIP, APS in France, Germany, Switzerland, US. Courts found in favor of HHB, in France only after 13 years, in 2000 --litigation cost in six-seven figure range.

Page ChargesInstituted in 1932 at $2/page to keep subscription prices down, and grew

Good in principle: Wider distribution of results, reasonable to include as part of research cost

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Page Charge8 Page paper

2009 $

Page Charge EXPT

2009 $

DELAYS

Not so good in the real worldProblems in practice

Some journals find competitive advantage in not having page chargesJournals have widely different pricesResearch support, relative to publication cost, differs (for Theory

especially)

Result: when research funding was tight (especially)Authors were driven to journals without page chargesSome countries, apparently, were not willing to support page chargesTheorists found it difficult to pay page chargesPublication was sometimes delayed if page charges were not paidNuclear and particle physics journals were particularly affected

PRC and PRD Editors argued that net result of page charges wasDrive authors to journals without page chargesThese journals had higher subscription costs, increasing library costs

Experiment: On July 1992, for three years, page charges waived for PRC and PRD compuscripts Never to return for compuscripts.

How PRC Grew

TOTAL ARTICLESThe nuclear physics literature = sum of EPA + JPG +NPA + PRC hasn’t

much changed since 1980: 1430 ± 80 articles per year (now more pages/article)

PRC share has grown from ~1/3 in 1970 to ~¾ at present.

PRC EPAJPGNPA

NO P.C.