Jamestuck C.V

BORN.

EDUCATED.

.POSITIONS.

A-5 3 - 0001

9th January, 1910

Curriculum Vitae.

JAMES L. TUCK 1974

Office of the War Cabinet.

Principal Scientific Officer.

BSc.(Hons.) ,1932, MSc. 1934 M.A *.

1937-39 1946-49 1952 1962-63· 1970 1939-44

Manchester, England. Manchester Central Grammer School. Victoria U. of Manchester. Oxford.

FELLOWSHIPS. Salter Research Fellow., U. of Oxford. I.C.I. Research Fellow., U. of Oxford. American Physical Society. Guggenheim. American Association for the Advancement of Science Scientific Advisor. Prime Minister’s Private Office .

Munroe (Cavity Charge) Effect, (with G.I. Taylor.) Explosive Lens. (with S. Neddermeyer, J. von Neumann.) Regenerative Cyclotron Beam Deflector. (with L. Teng.) DD. DT. Thermonuclear Cross-sections.

British Mission, Manhattan Project. 1943-46 (Los Alamos.) Supervisor of Advanced Studies, Clarendon Laboratory

Pioneer Research in Controlled FusIon, 1946, and again from 1951- including: Z. Pinch, ~~. Pinch, Entro~~ . ~rapping, Picket Fence, First Laboratory Thermonuclear Reaction.

Delegate, U.N. Atoms for Peace Conference, Geneva. Walker-Ames Distinguished Professor, U. of Washington. Order of the British Empire.

HONOURS. PUBLICATIONS. 61 Papers, mostly Physics, theoretical and experimental,

including 1 in Mathematics., 2 in Physical Chemistry, 3 Books (with other authors.), 40 Unpublished papers, (classified. )

Research Associate, U. of Chicago. Staff Member, Theoretical Physics Division.

Physics of Fluids. Journal of Applied Physics. I .A.E .A *. (Plasma Physics.)

(with Arnold, Phillips, Sawyer, Stovall. )

Associate Division Leader, Physics Division.

1956-73 1958. 1974. 1945.

Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.

Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory

1955-58 1955-58 1958-73

SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS.

EDITORIAL BOARDS.

1950-53

Oxford.

1949-50

1946~49

Biography.

James L. Tuck took the Matriculation and Higher School

His Ph.D. subject was on Reaction Kinetics of alkyl halides in

Certificate with sufficient distinction, (1928) to be able tQ attend the University of Manchester on Scholarships at that time of grave trade depression. The subjects for his B.Sc. (Honours) were Physics, Mathematics, and Chemist~. He then majored in Physical Chemistry firs t with Fairbrother, and later, with the distinguished physical chemist and philosopher, M. Polanyi, newly arrived refugee from the Hitler Terror.

liquid sulphur dioxide by a radioactive tracer method. The research was successful and some reaction constan~s were published. Before cOIrq;>leting the Ph.D. requirements by submitting a thesis he joined the late Leo Szilard at the Clarendon Laboratory Oxford, to work with him on the Accellerator theory and later an electron acce1 lerator. War pressures soon swept away any chances of completing the thesis at that time. Szilard, foreseeing the outbreak of war with Hitler, fled to the U.S., and shortly thereafter, when the head of the department, Lindemann joined his friend Churchill, first in ·the AdIDiralty and later as Prime Minister, Tuck went as his sole s tific advisor.

After three years of highly placed but distasteful administra tion, Tuck managed to make a crucial laboratory flash x ray experi ment to determine the mechanism of the then militarily important armour piercing property of certain explosive-liner configurations. This was being studied widely in the U.K.· and the U.S. The experi ment was ohighlysuccessful and together with G.I. Taylor, led to the complete elucidation of the Munroe (cavity Charge) effect, a

~t,tle .. ahe.ad_of a similar effort in the U.S ** (The Germans ..had, _

(imp+osion) for the atomic bomb was encountering grave problems at Los Alamos and Tuck, becoming known for this outstanding experiment, was asked by Los Alamos scientists, through Churchill, to join them

unknown to the Allies, already solved it by identical experimental procedure.)

which he did in early 1944. There he made a significant contribution

At that time, the research on the ultimate-assembly process

In 1944 he was awarded the O.B.E. for this contribution.

-2

Biography.

Lord Cberwell back to the Clarendon Laboratory soon became

to the first implosion weapon by devising an explosive lens. The Patent, never made public, bears the names Tuck, Neddermeyer; and von Newnann.

After atten~ing the Trinity Test (Alamorgordo) and running a large diagnosis -t eam at -Bikini he returned to Los Alamos to attempt to produce a laboratory thermonuclear reaction having been stimulated by the -thermonuclear lectures of Fermi. Advising the U. of Manchester that the writing of the thesis was at last underway, he was notified that the statute of limitations on presentirigathesis had run out.

of making a hydrogen bomb, and he invited Tuck to emigrate and return to Los Alamos. Tuck accepted on the condition that he spend one intermediate year at the U. of Chicago with Fermi, Anderson, and Marshall on the large cyclotron then being built. No way of .extracting beams with any efficiency.was- then known, and Tuck, work ing wi th Teng as a graduate s tuden t, came up· wi th a theory- .for extracting the beam by parametricexitation of the radialorbi t oscillation.· In the meantime, the year was up, and in- spite of very tempting .offers to stay with tenure at the u. of Chicago,-Tuck returned as planned to Teller and Los Alamos. A deflector built by Crewe at Liverpool and found to work exactly as predicted. It is in universal use for large cyclotrons.

insistent on his return and Tuck, leaving the re~earch to others, returned to Oxford in the autumn of 1946 to direct the getting into operation of an ingenious but ill conceived Betatron, and supervise some graduate students, as well as to advise H.M. government on atomic weapon research.

thermonuclear application-were not at that time at all well known, and with considerable urging from Fermi, Tuck assembled a team-to measure them.’ The experiment was successful and very important to subsequent weapon planning. The results were withheld from publi cation for security reasons for some time. Tuck had been holding

The· DD· and —DT-· cross …-sections - a1:“‘thE:f”j:O?Jr’en-erqie-s—appropriate —to

E. Teller in 1949 was assembling a team to take up the problem

-3

Biography.

Tuck’s main contribution to controlled fusion research is the -concept -of pulsed high densities-Z Pinch, e Pinch, Picket Fence as

compared with the lower density requiring much longer plasma con finement times of approaches such as Stellarator, Mirror’Machine,

and Tokamak.

classes on thermonuclear theory and at the urging of the team, now that their work was done, proposed a laboratory thermonuclear experiment (1951) Perhapsatron, based on the toroidal Z pinch which was funded by the Laboratory. About a year later, controlled nuclear research became a top priority subject in the A.E.C. at the urging of the then Chairman, Admiral Strauss and the first money to ___~~ all<?cated happened to be for Tuck, and was div~ted from Project Lincoln, in the Hood Laboratory. The coincidence of names prompted the well-known cover name “Project Sherwood”.

Tuck has lectured widely, having given invited lectures at Universities and Institutes i~ the U.S., ·U.K., U.S.S.R., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Austria, Italy’, ‘Afghanistan and Eire. While sti-llkeepingintouch-wi-th - controlled fusion research; since retire mEmt_he has developed- free r~~ging s~~ientific interests and has lectured on: The energy problem, ball lightning, and magnetic bird navigation. For April 1974, he was appointed Walker-Ames Distinguished Professor at the University of Washington and teaches a course in the In August 1974, he lectures at Spring quarter on the energy problem. an International School, University of Sidney, Australia.

was in the Los Alamos Scylla ~ pinch in 1957 but not confirmed by experiment- untll.-19=6.-L~-~~-By~~l72 thee Los-Alamos -controlled. fusion ~rogramme, running at $4 million per annum seemed due to pass ·to the quasi developmental scale. this’work (in favour of F.L. Ribe) and-in 1973 retired from the laboratory, retaining a consultant association with the programme. The Los Alamos ~ pinch has expanded (currently $10 million per annum), and jlbout to expand further, being one of the most promising (in Tuck’s opinion the most promising) approaches to fusion power.

The first thermonuclear action to be obtained in the laboratory

In. 1972, Tuck relinquished direction of