Albert Edward Litherland

Last updated
Albert Edward Litherland
Born12 March 1928
Nationality British
Other namesTed Litherland
Education University of Liverpool
OccupationNuclear physicist
Employer(s) National Research Council, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, University of Toronto
Known for Accelerator mass spectroscopy

Albert Edward "Ted" Litherland (born 12 March 1928, in Wallasey, UK) is a nuclear physicist, known for his pioneering work in accelerator mass spectroscopy (AMS).

Contents

Education and career

Litherland earned a BSc in 1949 and a PhD in 1955 from the University of Liverpool. From 1953 to 1955 he was a National Research Council Fellow and from 1955 to 1966 a career scientist at Chalk River Laboratories with Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. In 1966 he became a professor of physics at the University of Toronto and in 1979 a full professor, retiring as professor emeritus in 1993. In the academic years 1960–61 and 1972–73 he was a visiting professor at the University of Oxford. [1]

Litherland and Allan Bromley were, in the words of J. C. D. "Doug" Milton, "two of the key people working on the van de Graaff accelerators, the 3 MV home-made single-ended machine, and beginning in 1958, the world's first tandem accelerator, the EN tandem. The unprecedented precision and flexibility of the EN tandem made Chalk River the envy of physicists around the world and opened up the field of heavy-ion physics. Allan Bromley is sometimes called the father of heavy-ion physics. Litherland was honoured first of all for his work on the 3 MV machine through which, and with his insight and courage, the first proof that the collective model could be applied to a light nucleus, in this case 25Al. It led to a great simplification of our understanding of the spectra of such nuclei and directly to the Unified Model. Litherland went on to make critical contributions to nuclear structure research, primarily through the introduction, with John Ferguson, of new gamma-ray angular correlation techniques. In 1966, Litherland was recruited by the University of Toronto, and in 1967, he, along with Harry Gove and Ken Purser, realized the unique value of a tandem accelerator in measuring exquisitely minute quantities of 14C. Thus was born accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS); for his contribution the University of Toronto made him a university professor. Litherland subsequently became the director of Isotrace, a facility that leads the world in the introduction of new AMS techniques." [2]

IsoTrace Laboratory

In 1982 Litherland was the director for the establishment of the IsoTrace Laboratory at the University of Toronto. The initiation of the creation of the ISOTRACE (ISOTope and Rare Atom Counting Equipment) Laboratory occurred in April 1979 with Litherland and Rolf P. Beukens as two of the most important scientists involved. [3] While in operation from 1982 to its interim replacement period from 2008 to 2013, the laboratory used nuclear techniques in supersensitive mass spectrometers for archaeological dating, trace element detection, etc. [1] In 2013 the IsoTrace Laboratory ceased operation and was fully replaced by the André E. Lalonde AMS Laboratory with upgraded equipment and facilities. [4]

Honours and awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Van de Graaff generator</span> Electrostatic particle accelerator operating on the triboelectric effect

A Van de Graaff generator is an electrostatic generator which uses a moving belt to accumulate electric charge on a hollow metal globe on the top of an insulated column, creating very high electric potentials. It produces very high voltage direct current (DC) electricity at low current levels. It was invented by American physicist Robert J. Van de Graaff in 1929. The potential difference achieved by modern Van de Graaff generators can be as much as 5 megavolts. A tabletop version can produce on the order of 100 kV and can store enough energy to produce visible electric sparks. Small Van de Graaff machines are produced for entertainment, and for physics education to teach electrostatics; larger ones are displayed in some science museums.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Accelerator mass spectrometry</span> Accelerator that accelerates ions to high speeds before analysis

Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) is a form of mass spectrometry that accelerates ions to extraordinarily high kinetic energies before mass analysis. The special strength of AMS among the mass spectrometric methods is its power to separate a rare isotope from an abundant neighboring mass. The method suppresses molecular isobars completely and in many cases can separate atomic isobars also. This makes possible the detection of naturally occurring, long-lived radio-isotopes such as 10Be, 36Cl, 26Al and 14C. Their typical isotopic abundance ranges from 10−12 to 10−18. AMS can outperform the competing technique of decay counting for all isotopes where the half-life is long enough. Other advantages of AMS include its short measuring time as well as its ability to detect atoms in extremely small samples.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">D. Allan Bromley</span> Canadian-American physicist

David Allan Bromley was a Canadian-American physicist, academic administrator and science advisor to American president George H. W. Bush. His field of research was the study of low-energy nuclear reactions and structure using heavy ion beams.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Argonne Tandem Linear Accelerator System</span> Particle accelerator

The Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS) is a U.S. Department of Energy scientific user facility at Argonne National Laboratory. ATLAS is the first superconducting linear accelerator for heavy ions at energies in the vicinity of the Coulomb barrier and is open to scientists from all over the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar</span>

Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar is an autonomous research institution of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), Government of India. The institute was founded by Professor Bidhu Bhusan Das, who was Director of Public Instruction, Odisha, at that time. Das set up the institute in 1972, supported by the Government of Odisha under the patronage of Odisha's education minister Banamali Patnaik, and chose Dr. Trilochan Pradhan as its first director, when the Institute started theoretical research programs in the various branches of physics. Other notable physicists in the institute's early days included Prof. T. P. Das, of SUNY, Albany, New York, USA and Prof. Jagdish Mohanty of IIT Kanpur and Australian National University, Canberra. In 1981, the Institute moved to its present campus near Chandrasekharpur, Bhubaneswar. It was taken over by the Department of Atomic Energy, India on 25 March 1985 and started functioning as an autonomous body.

The Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, abbreviated as TUNL, is a tripartite research consortium operated by Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University and North Carolina Central University. The laboratory is located on the West Campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Researchers are now drawn from several other universities around the United States in addition to members from the founding universities. TUNL also participates in long term collaborations with universities and laboratories around the world. Funding for TUNL comes primarily from the United States Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Physics.

The Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator, VERA, is a particle accelerator. It is operated by the University of Vienna and is dedicated to Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS). It started operation in 1995.

Tandem Accelerator Superconducting Cyclotron (TASCC) was a Canadian particle accelerator facility constructed at Chalk River Laboratories on October 3, 1986. TASCC was the world's first Tandem Accelerator and able to accelerate most elements to 10 MeV per nucleon. The TASCC facility was decommissioned beginning in 1996.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hu Jimin</span> Chinese physicist

Hu Jimin was a Chinese nuclear physicist, plasma physicist and educator.

Charles Kincaid Bockelman was an American nuclear physicist and deputy provost of Yale University. He was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electrostatic particle accelerator</span>

An electrostatic particle accelerator is a particle accelerator in which charged particles are accelerated to a high energy by a static high voltage potential. This contrasts with the other major category of particle accelerator, oscillating field particle accelerators, in which the particles are accelerated by oscillating electric fields.

Walter Kutschera is an Austrian physicist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John R. Huizenga</span> American physicist who helped build the first atomic bomb

John Robert Huizenga was an American physicist who helped build the first atomic bomb and who also debunked University of Utah scientists' claim of achieving cold fusion.

The André E. Lalonde Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory is an accelerator mass spectrometry research facility at the University of Ottawa in Canada. It is currently the only facility of its type in Canada. It is named after former University of Ottawa Faculty of Science dean André E. Lalonde, who died of cancer in 2012.

The Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro is one of the four major research centers of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). The primary focus of research at this laboratory is in the fields of nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics, where five accelerators are currently used. It is one of the most important facilities in Italy for research in these fields. The main future project of the laboratory is the Selective Production of Exotic Species (SPES), in which various radionuclides will be produced for research and medicinal purposes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jens Dilling</span> Laboratory director in Canada

Jens Dilling is an experimental nuclear physicist and currently the director of institutional strategic planning at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Yale Wright Laboratory (Wright Lab) is a facility and research community at Yale University in New Haven, CT. Wright Lab enables researchers to develop, build and use research instrumentation for experiments in nuclear, particle and astrophysics across the globe that investigate the invisible universe. Before a transformation to its current purpose in 2017, Wright Lab was known as the Arthur W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory (WNSL). WNSL housed the first "Emperor" tandem Van de Graaff heavy ion accelerator and was founded by D. Allan Bromley, the "father of heavy-ion physics," in 1961 (see History, below, for more information).

Richard Francis Xavier Casten is an American nuclear physicist who serves as the D. Allan Bromley Professor Emeritus of Physics at Yale University. He is known for Casten's triangle, introduced in 1981.

References

  1. 1 2 Albert Edward Litherland – The Canadian Encyclopedia
  2. 1 2 "The Tedfest (Milton), 1999, www.cap.ca/pic/archives". Archived from the original on 2015-09-23. Retrieved 2014-02-07.
  3. Beukens, Roelf P. "The Isotrace Laboratory At The University of Totonto" (PDF).
  4. The André E. Lalonde AMS Laboratory
  5. Albert E. Litherland – John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation