page_title: M. Stanley Livingston
section_title: Cyclotrons
hierarchical_section_title: M. Stanley Livingston / Cyclotrons
caption_attribution_description: English: M. Stanley Livingston (L) and Ernest O. Lawrence in front of 27-inch cyclotron at the old Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
context_page_description: Milton Stanley Livingston was an American accelerator physicist, co-inventor of the cyclotron with Ernest Lawrence, and co-discoverer with Ernest Courant and Hartland Snyder of the strong focusing principle, which allowed development of modern large-scale particle accelerators. He built cyclotrons at the University of California, Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During World War II, he served in the operations research group at the Office of Naval Research.
  Livingston was the chairman of the Accelerator Project at Brookhaven National Laboratory, director of the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a professor of physics at MIT, and a recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award from the United States Department of Energy. He was Associate Director of the National Accelerator Laboratory from 1967 to 1970.
context_section_description: During that year, Livingston applied to graduate schools for teaching fellowships, and was accepted by both Harvard University and the University of California. He accepted the latter and returned to California. He wrote his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis on "The Production of High Velocity Hydrogen Ions without the Use of High Voltages", a topic suggested by Ernest Lawrence, who had noticed that ions of mass M and charge e moving in a uniform magnetic field B circulate at a constant frequency independent of energy:
  In theory, therefore, if a particle traversed an electrode with a voltage V N times, it would acquire energy of NeV. Stanley's task was to verify if this would work. In January 1931, Stanley managed to do just that, using a voltage of 1 kV to accelerate hydrogen ions to 80 keV. At Lawrence's prompting, Stanley quickly wrote up his thesis and submitted it in April 1931 so that he would be eligible for an instructorship the following year.  His oral exam proved more difficult. Raymond Birge started asking questions about nuclear physics, and Livingston had to admit that he knew nothing about the work of Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, and Charles Drummond Ellis, and had not read their 1930 monograph  Radiations from Radioactive Substances. Nonetheless, Lawrence managed to persuade the examiners to award Livingston his doctorate.
  In what would be become a recurring pattern, as soon as there was the first sign of success, Lawrence started planning a new, bigger machine, which became known as a cyclotron. Lawrence and Livingston drew up a design for an $800 27-inch (69 cm) cyclotron in early 1932, with a magnet that weighed 2 tons. Lawrence then found a massive 80-ton magnet that had originally been built to power a transatlantic radio link during World War I, but was now rusting in a junkyard in Palo Alto. This allowed them to build a 27-inch cyclotron.
  In the cyclotron, they had a powerful scientific instrument, but this did not translate into scientific discovery. In April 1932, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton at the Cavendish laboratory in England announced that they had bombarded lithium with protons and succeeded in transmuting it into helium. The energy required turned out to be quite low—well within the capability of the 11-inch cyclotron. On learning about it, Lawrence wired the Berkeley and asked for Cockcroft and Walton's results to be verified. It took the team until September to do so, mainly due to lack of adequate detection apparatus.
  
  Between 1932 and 1934, Livingston authored or co-authored over a dozen papers on nuclear physics and the cyclotron, but he felt overshadowed by Lawrence, and did not think that he had gotten sufficient credit for his part in designing the cyclotron, for which Lawrence would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in November 1939. Livingston therefore accepted an offer of an assistant professorship from Cornell University in 1934. He built a 2 MeV cyclotron at Cornell with an $800 grant and the help of graduate students and the departmental shop, the first one to be built outside Berkeley. He worked with Robert Bacher and Hans Bethe, helping produce one of the three milestone papers that appeared in Reviews of Modern Physics that became known as the "Bethe Bible". He also teamed up with Bethe to demonstrate for the first time that the neutron has a magnetic moment. Livingston recalled that Bethe:
  … gave me a feeling for the fundamentals of physics, and of what was going on in nuclear physics. With him for the first time I sensed how deep the field was, how involved it was, and how much we needed in the way of new information. I learned of many new kinds of concepts like magnetic moments and quantum aspects, that I had never heard of while with Lawrence. It was a different environment. I was now following a scholar and was really impressed. 
  Physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had decided that they too needed a cyclotron, and Robley Evans hired Livingston to build a 42-inch (110 cm) cyclotron there in 1938. Livingston became an instructor at
caption: M. Stanley Livingston (L) and Ernest O. Lawrence next to a 27-inch cyclotron at the Radiation Laboratory in 1934.
exif: {}