Kalmus was born in Prague on 25 January 1933, and moved to Britain with his parents and younger brother George Kalmus in 1939. His sister Elsa was born in 1945. The family became British citizens in 1946.
Education
Kalmus went to school first in London and then in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. From 1943 till 1951 he was at St Albans County Grammar School (later renamed Verulam School). He received his BSc (1954) and PhD (1957) at University College London[1] where he remained for a further three years as a Research Associate. He is now an Honorary Fellow of University College London.[1]
W and Z particles
Discovery of the W particle. The proton-antiproton collision creates a W particle which then decays into a high-energy electron, emitted at a wide angle from the beam (indicated by the arrow at the bottom-right) and an invisible neutrino whose presence is deduced by the missing energy of the electron.Discovery of the Z particle. The central detector of UA1 reveals the tell-tale signature of the long-awaited Z particle as it decays into an electron-positron pair (arrowed).
They built a large universal detector, aimed at investigating phenomena at the world's highest energy collisions, which were obtained from 1981 onwards, when the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron was converted into a proton-antiproton collider, as suggested by Rubbia, using the stochastic beam cooling technique devised by Simon van der Meer. The UK groups had joint responsibility for designing, constructing and operating a large hadron calorimeter and also a trigger processor.
The most celebrated work with the UA1 detector was the discovery in 1983 of the W and Z particles. This discovery provided the experimental evidence for the unification of two of nature's seemingly very different fundamental forces: electromagnetism (which underlies electricity generation) and the weak force (which allows the Sun to shine). The unification of these two forces is part of a quest to see if all forces in the universe can be united into a "theory of everything" (Unified Field Theory). Electroweak unification demonstrated that what had previously been considered nature's four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, weak interaction, strong interaction and gravity) were now reduced to three.
1957 to 1960 - Kalmus conducted research at UCL mainly on the development of new instruments, helping to build a small particle accelerator, a 29 MeV electron microtron, its beam extraction system, and its external focusing using quadrupole magnets (probably the first use of these in the UK), and later devising an accurate method of measuring relativistic electron beam energies using Cerenkov radiation, then a novel technique.
1960 to 1964 – Kalmus worked for Argonne National Laboratory, USA, initially in the Particle Accelerator Division, directed by Albert Crewe. He was responsible for designing beam-transport equipment for the coming 12.5 Gev Zero Gradient Synchrotron. He transferred to the High Energy Physics Division and in 1961 went to CERN with an Argonne group headed by Art Roberts. It was at CERN that he first met John Dowell, and they designed and set up a particle beamline at the new 25 GeV Proton Synchrotron. The Argonne group used this beamline to conduct a series of measurements of hyperon polarisation using a large optical spark chamber inside a magnetic field: a pioneering technique which much later became the basis of many other electronic imaging chambers. On returning to Argonne in 1962 he collaborated with a Chicago group in an experiment on boson production, work which was finished during future visits to the USA as a visiting scientist at the University of Chicago.
1964 onwards – Kalmus was appointed Lecturer at Queen Mary College, University of London.[1] He began a research collaboration with Alan Astbury of Rutherford Laboratory, which was to continue for about 20 years, when Alan Astbury moved to Canada. The Queen Mary and Rutherford Laboratory collaboration carried out a series of experiments at the new Nimrod accelerator at Rutherford Laboratory, mostly in strong interaction physics: nucleon isobar production in proton-proton collisions and elastic proton-proton scattering at wide angles, this time using spark chambers with sonic readout. Results from this accelerator helped to lay the experimental foundations of the quark model.
In 1970 this collaboration transferred their activities to CERN, to embark on a series of experiments on low energy antiproton-proton interactions. In this they were joined by physicists from Daresbury Laboratory and the University of Liverpool. Kalmus designed the (then) most intense low energy antiproton beam in the world. The experiments on differential cross sections and polarisation for the elastic and two-body meson channels culminated in the discovery of three new mesons and a determination of their quantum numbers. The period 1974 to 1978 was spent carrying out the last set of experiments at Nimrod. Kalmus designed a new low momentum beamline, this time for kaons, for a series of experiments with a polarised deuteron target. Several key measurements were made on kaon-nucleon elastic and charge exchange polarisation.
In late 1977 the Queen Mary group led by Peter Kalmus, along with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory group under Alan Astbury and the Birmingham University group led by John Dowell joined Carlo Rubbia in the international collaboration known as UA1 at CERN. The UK groups involved had joint responsibility for designing, building and operating a large hadron calorimeter and also a trigger processor as part of the UA1 collaboration. The calorimeter, which measured the energies of strongly-interacting particles emerging from collisions, consisted of 7,000 sheets of plastic scintillator with a total mass of 30 tonnes placed in slots in the return yoke of a large electromagnet. Testing of the scintillator sheets was carried out at Queen Mary using cosmic rays. The scintillator light was transferred via fluorescent wavelength-shifter bars and light guides to 2000 photomultipliers outside the magnet. The number of proton-antiproton collisions exceeded the ability to record these by a factor of at least 1000. This necessitated the design of a trigger processor, a purpose-built electronic device which had to make decisions within 2 microseconds on which 1 in 1000 collisions was likely to be worth recording on magnetic tape for subsequent analysis, and which 999 could be discarded irretrievably. Some years later when the collision rate had increased, a new trigger processor was built.
The most celebrated work with the UA1 detector led to the discovery in 1983 of the W and Z particles. This work resulted in Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer of CERN receiving the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physics. In 1988, Peter Kalmus and John Dowell were jointly awarded the Rutherford Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics for their outstanding roles in the discovery of the W and Z particles (Alan Astbury had already received this medal in 1984).
UA1 was perhaps the most productive collaboration in the history of particle physics up to that date. It yielded results in quark and lepton physics, tests of quantum chromodynamics, properties of W and Z particles and other topics, which have been published in over 60 papers and presented at numerous conferences. The concept of a universal detector, measuring as much as possible of the outgoing particles from a collider, and covering nearly the whole of the solid angle, has been used ever since at colliding beam machines. This work finished in 1989.
At the end of 1989 the Queen Mary group joined another large collaboration called H1. The H1 collaboration had embarked on building a huge detector for the world's first proton-electron collider, HERA, which was being constructed at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg. The Queen Mary group was responsible for designing and constructing a time-of-flight hodoscope for H1, a piece of apparatus that proved crucial to the operation of the experiment as it reduced the unwanted background by a factor of a hundred. Many of the initiatives came from Kalmus's colleagues Graham Thompson and Eric Eisenhandler, particularly after Kalmus became Head of Department at Queen Mary, University of London in 1992[1] and had less time for research.
Publications
Kalmus is the author or co-author of about 230 scientific papers.[1] He has always emphasised that modern experimental particle physics research is a group activity, and that past and present colleagues and research students have contributed strongly to the strength of the group.
Academia and education
In parallel with his research activities, Kalmus was a dedicated university teacher. He has taught numerous physics courses, ranging from pre-university A-level to international postgraduate school standard. His initial teaching was in the evenings at Northern Polytechnic and at Chelsea Polytechnic during the period 1955 to 1960. He has taught at all levels at Queen Mary College (Now Queen Mary, University of London), since 1964. Kalmus became Reader at Queen Mary in 1966 and Professor in 1978.[1]
In 1992 Kalmus was appointed Head of Department at Queen Mary.[1] This severely curtailed his personal involvement in the H1 research programme, which however continued to flourish with the strong participation of his colleagues.
Kalmus was given the title Emeritus Professor in 1998 after reaching nominal retirement age. However he continued to work normal hours in the department. He decided not to continue his participation in collaborative research involving enormous teams, and instead to devote more time to other physics interests, such as the Institute of Physics, and in particular to the public awareness and understanding of science.
Kalmus has always been interested in furthering the public awareness and understanding of science. He started giving outreach lectures in the late 1950s, initially on nuclear power (then a novel source of electricity) to Women's Institutes. Kalmus was a pioneer in this, because at this time the popularisation of science was regarded with suspicion by some senior members of the science establishment. However, Kalmus always felt that scientists had a duty to explain what they were doing, and persisted throughout his career. Following an influential report by the Royal Society and particularly after the new UK Research Councils came into existence in 1994, such outreach activities became not only respectable but almost mandatory.
Kalmus is known in physics for his outreach work and for his popular lectures to schools and general audiences.[1] These have also been delivered at meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (now called the British Science Association), at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Institute of Physics, the Association for Science Education, the Edinburgh Science Festival, the Bournemouth Arts Festival, to science and astronomy clubs, and abroad in several continents. He has made a number of short radio broadcasts on scientific topics, and appeared occasionally on TV.
During the 1998–99 academic year he gave the Institute of Physics Schools Lecture 43 times in various venues in England, Scotland, Wales and the Channel Islands to a total audience of about 9,800 people, mostly in the 15 - 19 age group. At the invitation of the South African Institute of Physics this lecture-demonstration was repeated at 15 universities in South Africa during a 3-week period in early 2000, to a total audience of 3,500 consisting of university students and staff, senior school pupils, and members of the general public.
He subsequently gave this talk to other audiences in Dublin, Belfast and several venues in Britain. Different lectures on aspects of particle physics were given on behalf of the Royal Institution on about 10 occasions at Futuroscope in Poitiers, France, to more than 3,800 UK sixth formers who were there on study-visits.
In January 2001, Kalmus gave the named "Cockcroft and Walton Lectures" in India, as part of an exchange programme between the Institute of Physics and the Indian Physics Association. Nine lectures were given in four different cities, some at professional and others at popular level. He also visited and had discussions with staff at many Indian institutions, and represented the British Association at the Indian Science Congress in Delhi. He visited India again in 2004 giving 15 lectures on behalf of the British Council. He continued to give talks in the UK and abroad. By the summer of 2010 he had given about 200 talks to a total audience of 30,000 people since his retirement.
He has twice presented at the Royal Society soirees: in 1984 on "The discovery of the W and Z particles" and in 1994 on "The structure of the proton".
Kalmus was also an Associate Editor of Science Spectrum magazine.
Chair, Davy Faraday Laboratory Research Committee, 1998–1999.[1]
Kalmus has been particularly active in serving the Institute of Physics, having served as Council Member, Chair of several groups and committees, and as Vice President with special responsibility for education and public affairs. Through 2005–2009, Kalmus served as Chair of the London and South East Branch of the Institute of Physics. This period culminated in the award of the Institute of Physics Branches Prize in 2010.
Kalmus continued to have involvement with the Institute of Physics after retirement from Queen Mary, serving on its Benevolent Fund Committee, on a panel to examine its journal publishing policy, and as its representative on an international steering group for the World Year of Physics 2005, the centenary of Einstein's "Miracle Year".
2010 - Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics, for his research, his teaching, his public engagement and his work for the Institute. He joined only 38 other recipients including 7 Nobel Laureates.[1][4]
His brother, George Kalmus, is another noted British particle physicist. A press release from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) in 2002 commented that "A particle physicist in the family is a rare occurrence. That there should be two and both be leaders of the field is even more unusual, yet Professors Peter and George Kalmus have achieved this."[5]
Peter Kalmus married Felicity "Trixie" Barker in 1957, she died in 2018. He has one son and one daughter, and one grandchild. He currently resides in London.
Related Research Articles
Carlo Rubbia is an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN.
Simon van der Meer was a Dutch particle accelerator physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Carlo Rubbia for contributions to the CERN project which led to the discovery of the W and Z particles, the two fundamental communicators of the weak interaction.
The Underground Area 2 (UA2) experiment was a high-energy physics experiment at the Proton-Antiproton Collider — a modification of the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) — at CERN. The experiment ran from 1981 until 1990, and its main objective was to discover the W and Z bosons. UA2, together with the UA1 experiment, succeeded in discovering these particles in 1983, leading to the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer. The UA2 experiment also observed the first evidence for jet production in hadron collisions in 1981, and was involved in the searches of the top quark and of supersymmetric particles. Pierre Darriulat was the spokesperson of UA2 from 1981 to 1986, followed by Luigi Di Lella from 1986 to 1990.
The UA1 experiment was a high-energy physics experiment that ran at CERN's Proton-Antiproton Collider, a modification of the one-beam Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). The data was recorded between 1981 and 1990. The joint discovery of the W and Z bosons by this experiment and the UA2 experiment in 1983 led to the Nobel Prize for physics being awarded to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer in 1984. Peter Kalmus and John Dowell, from the UK groups working on the project, were jointly awarded the 1988 Rutherford Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics for their outstanding roles in the discovery of the W and Z particles.
The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is a particle accelerator of the synchrotron type at CERN. It is housed in a circular tunnel, 6.9 kilometres (4.3 mi) in circumference, straddling the border of France and Switzerland near Geneva, Switzerland.
George Ernest Kalmus, CBE, FRS is a noted British particle physicist.
Nigel Stuart Lockyer is a British-American experimental particle physicist. He is the current director of the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based ScienceS and Education (CLASSE) as of May 1, 2023. He was the Director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), in Batavia, Illinois, the leading particle physics laboratory in the United States, from September 2013 to April 2022.
Herwig Franz Schopper is a German experimental physicist. He was the director general of CERN from 1981 to 1988.
Lyn Evans CBE FINSTP FLSW FRS, is a Welsh scientist who served as the project leader of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Based at CERN, in 2012 he became the director of the Linear Collider Collaboration, an international organisation managing development of next generation particle colliders, including the International Linear Collider and the Compact Linear Collider.
Alan Astbury (1934–2014) was a Canadian physicist, emeritus professor at the University of Victoria, and director of the Tri-Universities Meson Facility (TRIUMF) laboratory.
Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee,, is a Kenyan-born British experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) with a few other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' of the project. CMS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1991 and now has over 3500 participants from 45 countries.
Peter Jenni, is an experimental particle physicist working at CERN. He is best known as one of the "founding fathers" of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider together with a few other colleagues. He acted as spokesperson of the ATLAS Collaboration until 2009. ATLAS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1992 involving roughly 3,000 physicists at 183 institutions in 38 countries. Jenni was directly involved in the experimental work leading to the discoveries of the W and Z bosons in the 1980s and the Higgs boson in 2012. He is (co-)author of about 1000 publications in scientific journals.
Vinod Chandrasinh Chohan was a Tanzanian-born accelerator specialist and engineer. He was a Senior Staff Member at CERN for nearly 40 years.
Pierre Darriulat is a French experimental particle physicist. As staff member at CERN, he contributed in several prestigious experiments. He was the spokesperson of the UA2 collaboration from 1981 to 1986, during which time the UA2 collaboration, together with the UA1 collaboration, discovered the W and Z bosons in 1983.
The Super Proton–Antiproton Synchrotron was a particle accelerator that operated at CERN from 1981 to 1991. To operate as a proton-antiproton collider the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) underwent substantial modifications, altering it from a one beam synchrotron to a two-beam collider. The main experiments at the accelerator were UA1 and UA2, where the W and Z bosons were discovered in 1983. Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer received the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to the SppS-project, which led to the discovery of the W and Z bosons. Other experiments conducted at the SppS were UA4, UA5 and UA8.
Amanda Margaret Cooper-Sarkar is an English particle physicist. She is an expert on deep inelastic scattering and parton distribution functions.
]
Paraskevas Andreas Sphicas is a particle physicist who focuses on studies of High energy collisions in the Large Hadron Collider through which he explores supersymmetry and the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking. He is a senior scientist at CERN and professor of physics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2019.
Ian Butterworth CBE FRS was a particle physicist. His career included a period as a research director at CERN from 1983 to 1986. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1981, and was made Commander of the British Empire in 1984.
Hugh Muirhead was a British nuclear physicist and the last surviving author of the scientific paper announcing the discovery of the pion, a particle predicted by Hideki Yukawa.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
